- Twenty-First Century Fox is trading up (FOX +1.6%, FOXA +2%) after a successful weekend for Matt Damon in The Martian, which easily topped the box office with $55M.
- It seemed like The Martian's weekend even before it hit theaters, with NASA's "water on Mars" announcement last Monday. The agency had been in touch in recent months with director Ridley Scott about their likely findings there. The film added $45M in foreign markets to hit $100M globally in its first weekend.
-
Hotel Transylvania 2 (SNE +2.4%), which set a September opening record last week, was in the second position with $33M to bring its cumulative gross to $90.5M. Sicario (LGF +1.6%), which had logged impressive per-screen averages for Lions Gate in very light release the previous two weeks, took $12.1M in its wide release for third place.
- Fox also ran up numbers for its sequel Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials, which has a three-week total of $63.2M.
- Wags noted that among Saving Private Ryan, Interstellar and The Martian, U.S. studios have spent hundreds of millions of dollars simply retrieving Matt Damon from somewhere. Maybe a good strategy, as those films have worldwide grosses of $482M, $675M and $100M (so far) respectively.