I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: Labor Day weekend doesn’t need to be a box office wasteland, but Hollywood sure seems determined to keep it that way.

Our number one movie–once again–is Weapons, which continues WB’s absolute dominance of the marketplace this year, although that might change over the next few months. Clearly, word-of-mouth and an overall lack of strong competition are keeping Weapons locked and loaded (although why isn’t similar audience enthusiasm working in The Naked Gun’s favor? Sometimes I just don’t get moviegoers), with a current tally of $132 million million. Next week, it will lose its mantle to another WB tentpole in the demonic form of The Conjuring: Last Rites, though it remains to be seen just how much life that franchise has left in it.

Next up, we don’t have Caught Stealing, but instead the re-release of the OG summer blockbuster from 50 years ago. Jaws chomped up $8 million, which easily eclipses the numbers for the Labor Day reissue of Close Encounters of the Third Kind from a few years back which was exclusively in PLF screens. I don’t know why Jaws didn’t have more available showtimes in 3-D as that should’ve been a big selling factor here, but I digress. Jaws obviously rocks, so it’s cool it’s still getting the love.

Unfortunately, Caught Stealing isn’t stealing much of a profit. An uncharacteristically lighthearted romp for the normally broody Darren Aronofsky, filmgoers just didn’t show interest despite solid reviews. Ultimately, the streaming era really has hurt non-tentpole original outings like this one. Not far behind it is The Roses, a loose remake of The War of the Roses which for my money looked quite funny. For whatever reason, this isn’t playing at my local theater, which makes no sense since it’s on 2,700 screens. Huh.

Finally, The Toxic Avenger isn’t avenging anyone, as it opens outside of the top ten. A property like this requires viral marketing to really draw in a crowd, and regrettably they just never got the ball rolling for this one. Did potential fans even know this was playing? The remake of the cult classic has apparently been sitting on the shelf for two years, but not from lack of quality as reviews were actually on board for this. Was releasing it “unrated” a bad idea? At my theater at least, all showings for the remainder of the week are after 6:00PM. Not everything is going to bring in those sweet Terrifier 3 numbers if you remove the MPA from the equation.

And so ends summer movie season. While there were more “hits” this year than the writer’s strike-starved market last year, there were no mega-hits outside of Disney’s Lilo and Stitch of all things, a film that wasn’t even supposed to go to theaters. By comparison, 2024 brought us the $600 million+ blockbusters Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine (both from Disney, natch!).

Anyway, the top ten, via The Numbers