Expendables 2 Wheezes to a Win, As People Still Dare to Go to the Movies

“What a crazy Friday,” Nikki Finke wrote early Saturday on her popular Deadline Hollywood blog. “First came that morning’s bomb scare phoned into the Carmike Cinema chain. Then a consulting firm Screen Engine poll finds 17% of filmgoers are still reluctant to head to theaters, only slightly better than the 21% recorded four weeks ago right after the Aurora movie theater shooting. (The surveys found that teenagers, particularly females, were most reluctant to go to the movie now.) At least there’s no more Olympics. But post-10 PM screenings were still weak after I first reported the phenom last weekend.”

It got crazier. For all the dire portents — including that phone call threatening havoc to all Carmike theaters showing The Expendables 2, and the arrest in Columbus, Ga., of an armed man trying to sneak in an early showing of the same movie — attendance at the North American box office was up 31% over the same weekend last year, from $97 million to about $127 million. Instead of four films topping the $10-million mark, as happened in the mid-August weekend of 2011, seven managed the feat this time. And one of those movies, Sparkle, attracted an audience that was 74% female. It seems that, no matter what the scare headlines, invoking the slaughter at a screening of The Dark Knight Rises four weeks ago, people still dare to get their entertainment at the multiplex.

(READ: Corliss on The Dark Knight Rises and the ‘Aurora Effect’)

As for the reputed drop in showings after 10 p.m.: Who goes to those anyway? Not that much of the audience for The Expendables 2, the 66-year-old Sylvester Stallone’s sequel to his 2010 reunion of venerable action stars. The film’s weekend demographic was, by Hollywood standards, geriatric: 65% over the age of 25 (and 63% male). The movie’s $28.75-million take, enough to win the weekend according to preliminary studio estimates, was significantly behind the $34.8 million opening gross of its predecessor, which went on to earn $103.4 million at the domestic box office. For Sly’s over-the-hill romp to make a profit on its $90-million production cost, it will need help from the foreign markets, which is doable; the first Expendables amassed more than 60% of its revenue overseas.

(SEE: Which Expendables Star Is the Most Expendable?)

The film certainly appealed to its customers, who gave it an A-minus CinemaScore rating. And critics, who might have been expected to use The Expendables 2 as a piñata for everything they hate about big, dumb summer movies, instead reacted indulgently, handing it a 67% positive mark on the Rotten Tomatoes aggregate-review site. With this encouragement, Stallone must already be dreaming of an Expendables 3. Considering that he extended his Rocky franchise for 30 years (from 1976 to 2006) and his Rambo series 26 years (1982-2008), Sly could be playing Barney Ross well into his nineties, when he and his co-starring Expendables have long since become the Uninsurables.

(READ: Steven James Snyder’s review of Expendables 2) 

Another muscle-man epic, The Bourne Legacy, dropped to second place, with $17 million. Last weekend the Jeremy Renner spy conundrum replaced the three-week champ The Dark Knight Rises in the No. 1 slot; but Christopher Nolan’s wrapup to his Batman trilogy is doing fine, thanks, if not quite super-blockbuster spectacular. With $409.9 million in the North American till after 31 days, TDKR has passed The Hunger Games ($407.7 million since its March opening) as the second biggest hit of 2012. Still, that’s less than two-thirds the gross of the year’s top film, The Avengers ($617.6), and well below the 31-day total of $471.1 million earned by The Dark Knight, its 2008 predecessor. So far, TDKR has taken in $445.3 million overseas for an $855.2 million global gross. Prospects are slim to some that it will match The Dark Knight’s $1-billion worldwide finish.