Fox’s “The Predator” earned $2.5 million at the Thursday box office, while Paul Feig’s noir thriller “A Simple Favor” grossed $900,000.
Produced for $88 million, Shane Black’s film is expected to earn in the high $20 million range. “The Predator” stars Boyd Holdbrook, Sterling K. Brown, Olivia Munn, Jacob Tremblay, Trevante Rhodes and Keegan-Michael Key. It currently holds a score of 34 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.
“The Predator” starts with a boy (Tremblay) who accidentally turns on an alien signal that he thinks is a toy. The signal triggers the return of the titular alien race, which has become even stronger thanks to DNA fusion with other races it has hunted.
“A Simple Favor” is expected to gross somewhere in the mid-teens this weekend. Starring Anna Kendrick, Blake Lively, and “Crazy Rich Asians” star Henry Golding, the film follows a small-town blogger who sets out to discover why her best friend, Emily, has suddenly disappeared. Emily’s husband joins in the search, only for the two to fall down a path of mystery and murder. Written by Jessica Sherzer, the film has an 83 percent RT score.
New Line’s “The Nun,” which is expected to go head-to-head with “The Predator” for the number one spot this weekend, grossed another $2.2 million on Thursday, bringing its cumulative total to $66.9 million since its debut last weekend.
Sony’s “White Boy Rick” took in $575,000 on Thursday night from 2,176 locations. The studio is projecting an opening weekend between $8 million and $10 million.
“White Boy Rick” stars Matthew McConaughey and newcomer Richie Merritt as a father and son duo living in Detroit at the height of the cocaine wars in the 1980s. The son, Rick Wershe, Jr., became known as an undercover police informant and one of the city’s most successful drug dealers before being abandoned by his handlers and sentenced to life in prison — all before the age of 18. Yann Demange (“’71”) directed the film from a script written by Andy Weiss with Logan and Noah Miller.