Weekend Box Office: Rampaging pets bust rebooted ghosts
Continuing to complicate the narrative surrounding the new Ghostbusters movie, the female-led remake didn’t score the No. 1 spot at the box office last weekend. But it didn’t bomb, either. Instead, it pulled in a respectable $46 million, coming in just behind The Secret Life Of Pets, which dropped to less than half of last week’s record-breaking $104 million haul at $50.5 million but still managed to keep the No. 1 spot on a slow summer weekend. (Ticket sales are down 17 percent overall from this time last year.) Still, this is the biggest domestic opening yet for director Paul Feig and frequent co-star Melissa McCarthy, and word-of-mouth—the good kind this time—from women excited to see themselves represented on screen (and nursing crushes on Kate McKinnon) could carry Ghostbusters through the next few weeks.