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Warner Brothers was skeptical about ‘The Legend Of Tarzan’ starring Alexander Skarsgård.  The literary character, created by writer Edgar Rice Borroughs, has appeared in over 200 movies, but hasn’t been a very visible character in many years.  But the film took in an unexpected $38 million over three days.  (It’s technically a four-day weekend, so it is projected to come out at around $43.1M once the 4th of July holiday factors in.)  Despite doing well, ‘Tarzan’ may be performing a bit weakly due to this spring’s ‘The Jungle Book’, which may have sated some potential film-goers when it comes to CGI-heavy jungle movies.

Also performing quite well is Blumhouse’s ‘The Purge: Election Year’.  This sleeper horror franchise has seen its popularity steadily increase with this third installment taking in $38.4M.  It has scored a B+ CinemaScore ranking, which is actually quite high for a horror movie.

The big difference, of course, is that ‘The Purge: Election Year’ was made on a tiny budget ($10M) with no stars, while ‘The Legend of Tarzan’ cost a steep $180M to make, so the latter is heavily banking on foreign box office to make that up.  But its A- CinemaScore may help.

Unfortunately, neither of them were mighty enough to take down Disney/PIXAR’s ‘Finding Dory’, which continued to rule the box office at #1, with an additional $41.9M.

Here are the official numbers:

  1. Finding Dory (Disney) – $41.9M
  2. The Legend of Tarzan (Warner Brothers) – $38M
  3. The Purge: Election Year (Universal) – $30.8M
  4. The BFG (Disney) – $19.58M
  5. Independence Day: Resurgence (20th Century Fox) – $16.5M

Also scoring an A- with audiences was Disney’s live-action ‘The BFG’ which fared better with critics (72% on Rotten Tomatoes) than either ‘Tarzan’ or ‘Election Year’.  Unfortunately, the film came in weaker, with just $19.5M in its opening weekend.

Next week sees the release of Disney’s ‘The Secret Life of Pets’ which may… or may not take a bite out of ‘Dory’.  But ‘Dory’ has the fact that it’s a sequel to a beloved existing film going for it.  (Then again, I never saw ‘Zootopia”s crazy success coming, so this could be another of those.)  Also opening is the Zac Efron comedy ‘Mike And Dave Need Wedding Dates’ bust considering the lackluster performance of comedies this summer… meh.  We’ll see.

Source: Deadline