September 4, 2012 by Paul Curtin
With nothing too exciting hitting theaters, the Labor Day weekend once again ended the summer movie season with a fizzle after starting out with a bang. Sam Raimi’s horror flick The Possession took the top spot in its opening by pulling in $18 million and surprisingly beating out the star-studded cast of Lawless that only managed to bring in a meager $10 million in its debut — recently turned hipster Shia LaBeouf should be happy now that his streak of opening number one at the box office and making money is over.
But the big news coming out of the weekend was that both The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises passed new milestones at the box office. Marvel’s re-release of The Avengers over the weekend helped bring in another $2 million to its gross, which just passed the $1.5 billion mark worldwide and currently sits at #3 on the list of highest-grossing films.
Not to be overshadowed by this summer’s biggest hit and superhero rival, The Dark Knight Rises has also been rising on the highest-grossing films list and over the weekend passed a milestone of its own, becoming the 13th film ever to cross the $1 billion mark.
Speaking of record setters, another new film over the weekend that got no love from moviegoers. The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure might have been a children’s film, but the creepy puppets had a horrific start by becoming one of the worst openings of all time for a movie in more than 2,000 theaters. Only grossing $445,000 and opening at #26 over the weekend, The Oogieloves also had the second-worst per-theater average for a movie in nationwide release at just $206.
Check out this weekend’s top five films at the box office below via BOM:
- The Possession — Weekend Gross: $17.7 million — Total Gross: $17.7 million (new)
- Lawless— Weekend Gross: $10 million — Total Gross: $12.1 million (new)
- The Expendables 2 — Weekend Gross: $8.9 million — Total Gross: $66.3 million (#1 last week)
- The Bourne Legacy — Weekend Gross: $7.3 million — Total Gross: $96.3 million (#2 last week)
- ParaNorman — Weekend Gross: $6.5 million — Total Gross: $38 million (#3 last week)
