Weekend Box Office: Homecoming is king

The other big success story of the week is also Hannibal Buress-adjacent, as Kumail Nanjiani—Buress’ former castmate at Chicago-based stand-up showcase the Lincoln Lodge—saw his new movie The Big Sick, based on his real-life romance with his wife Emily Gordon, climb from No. 12 to No. 8 ahead of its wide release next week. That puts it ahead of would-be box-office juggernauts like Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales and The Mummy, both of which pulled in less than one-third of The Big Sick’s $3.6 million despite playing on three times as many screens.

Not much opened in wide release last week as competitors gave Spidey a wide berth, meaning that the only other new movies this week were all limited releases. Out of those, A Ghost Story—a favorite of our film editor A.A. Dowd—performed the best with a $27,017 average on four screens, followed by the very heavy, and very timely, documentary City Of Ghosts, which opened on a mere two screens with $16,240. Both of those are set to expand later in the summer, where we’ll see if they go the way of Baby Driver, currently running with the big dogs at No. 3, or The Beguiled, which dropped an additional 34 percent last weekend to end up at No. 10. Still doing better than Pirates and The Mummy, though.