Box Office: ‘Good Boys’ Beats ‘Hobbs & Shaw’ for Top Spot

The surprisingly successful R-rated kid comedy Good Boys pushed Hobbs & Shaw out of the top box office spot.

Universal’s Good Boys surged far past expectations of earning up to $15 million by topping $20 million for its debut weekend, according to Variety. The raunchy kid comedy was the breakout leader for the weekend’s debuting films and is a surprise hit for the studio.

Good Boys, from Seth Rogen, whose Superbad was also a raunchy coming-of-age hit, now ranks as Universal’s first number one R-rated comedy since 2016’s The Boss. And Boys may just rank as the biggest comedy of the year if its numbers hold over the next few weeks.

Except for fourth place, most of the top five are holdover films from previous weeks. Number two, for instance, is Universal’s Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw. The Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham spinoff took in over $13 million for its third weekend at theaters and cruised past the $300 million mark with its domestic and overseas take combined.

The film has now earned back its high production cost of $200 million and has shown that a spinoff of the Fast & Furious series can succeed, at least if it stars Johnson and Statham.

Maintaining its top five ranking is Disney’s The Lion King which looks to have pulled in another $11 million in ticket sales. This will put the film’s total at around $495 million which will hand the film the rank of Disney’s all-time top animated movie in the domestic box office. By mid-week, Lion King will also hit the $500 million mark, only the 14th film ever to make that claim.

Jumping in at fourth place for a debut of about $10 million is Sony Animation’s Angry Birds Movie 2. This debut, though, is a far cry from the first film in the series which earned a $38 million opening in 2016, Box Office Mojo reported.

Finally, in the fifth spot is eOne and Lionsgate’s holdover, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, which scared up another $9.4 million bringing its total domestic sales to just over $40 million.

Three other films that debuted this weekend all struggled to pull in viewers. Entertainment Studio’s 47 Meters Down: Uncaged underperformed expectations earning only about $8 million of an expected $14 million debut, Annapurna’s Where’d You Go Bernadette fared even worse by picking up only about $3.6 million, and Warner Bros. and New Line’s Blinded by the Light suffered a crashing defeat with only about a $3.4 million opening.

Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston.