Ride Along 2 earned the top spot for the three-day weekend (not counting the holiday) with a $34 million debut that — as many box-office prognosticators expected — was enough to beat the blockbuster sci-fi sequel in its fifth week of screenings. Ice Cube and Kevin Hart’s odd-couple comedy wasn’t the only film to finish ahead of Star Wars, though, as the Oscar-friendly frontier drama The Revenant also topped The Force Awakens.
While Star Wars’ drop from the top spot was expected (and almost happened a week ago), that doesn’t mean J.J. Abrams’ sequel is losing any significant steam. Currently the highest-grossing film of all time in U.S. theaters and the third highest-grossing film of all time worldwide, The Force Awakens is just $130 million short of breaking the $2 billion mark — a feat only achieved by two other movies — in just its fifth week in theaters.
For the sake of comparison, it took current all-time worldwide box-office champion Avatar a grand total of 34 weeks to earn its record-setting $2.78 billion.
| # | Title | Weekend | U.S. Total | Worldwide Total |
| 1. | Ride Along 2 | $34M | $34M | $42.2M |
| 2. | The Revenant | $29.5M | $87.7M | $151.8M |
| 3. | Star Wars: The Force Awakens | $25.1M | $856.9M | $1,869.5M |
| 4. | 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi | $16M | $16M | $16M |
| 5. | Daddy’s Home | $9.3M | $129.3M | $181.7M |
| 6. | Norm of the North | $6.7M | $6.7M | $6.7M |
| 7. | The Forest | $5.8M | $21.1M | $22.4M |
| 8. | The Big Short | $5.2M | $50.5M | $69.6M |
| 9. | Sisters | $4.4M | $81.9M | $94M |
| 10. | The Hateful Eight | $3.4M | $47.6M | $65M |
As for the weekend’s other films, Michael Bay’s 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi and the animated feature Norm of the North both debuted amid the week’s top 10 movies. The $16 million opening weekend for the politically charged 13 Hours is the lowest debut for any of Bay’s films since 2005’s The Island, and box-office experts are predicting that the film will end up being one of the director’s lowest-grossing films overall — earning around the same amount as 2013’s underperforming Pain & Gain.
The announcement of this year’s Oscar nominees last week also seemed to give some of those films a boost at the box office, with The Revenant and The Big Short both holding relatively strong at theaters, and Oscar darlings Brooklyn and Spotlight both increasing their week-to-week earnings.
On the flip side, Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight continued its surprisingly disappointing run with a $3.4 million weekend that barely made it into the top 10 and dropped more than 45 percent from last week. The film is doing just fine from a critical standpoint with a 75 percent “Fresh” rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, but can’t seem to convert that critical goodwill into box-office success.
Next week’s releases include the sci-fi thriller The 5th Wave, based on a series of young-adult novels and starring Chloe Grace Moretz, as well as Robert De Niro and Zac Efron’s raunchy comedy Dirty Grandpa.
