Smith Stumbles, Fast & Furious Repeats

Fast & Furious 6, back at #1

Even Will Smith & some well-known "magicians" couldn't slow down Fast & Furious 6, as Universal's summer smash finished atop the weekend box office for a second straight week. Fast 6 earned another $34.5 million to increase its 10-day domestic cume to just north of $170 million. New entries Now You See Me ($28.1M) and After Earth ($27M) battled it out for second place, with the former surpassing its $20 million projections; while Smith's After Earth fell way short of Sony's $35-40 million estimate.

Summit Entertainment's Now You See Me surprised a lot of folks (including this reviewer) with an A- CinemaScore, allowing it to slip past the bigger budget After Earth. Sony's "Smith & Son" production bombed with critics and didn't fare much better with audiences (B- CinemaScore.) Its third place finish also ended Smith's two-decade streak of debuting #1 in a summer film.

The Hangover Part III slipped to 6th overall domestically ($15.9M) but excelled overseas, earning a whopping $82.3 million (good for #1 overall.) Evidently, the rest of the world has a funny way of evaluating humor. Star Trek Into Darkness ($16.4 million) continued to do well, narrowly holding off Fox's Epic for fourth place (although that could change when tomorrow's official results are announced.)

On the indy front, Zal Batmanglij's thriller The East and CBS' The Kings of Summer each opened across four theaters to sparkling results. The East earned $75,628 for a per screen average of just under $19K; while The Kings of Summer brought in $14.5K per ($58K total.)

Coming up... Fast 6 could top the charts for three weeks in a row, as Vince Vaughn & Owen Wilson's The Internship leads a relatively weak field of new openings this weekend.

The top 10 films for this weekend...

1. Fast & Furious 6 $34.5M

2. Now You See Me $28.1M

3. After Earth $27M

4. Star Trek Into Darkness $16.4M

5. Epic $$16.4M

6. The Hangover Part III $15.9M

7. Iron Man 3 $8M

8. The Great Gatsby $6.3M

9. Mud $1.2M

10. The Croods $615,000