‘Straight Outta Compton’ Tops Box Office
LOS ANGELES — The N.W.A. biopic “Straight Outta Compton,” backed by a sophisticated marketing campaign, touched a cultural nerve over the weekend, taking in
$56.1 million at the domestic box office, an astounding total for an R-rated drama.
That blockbuster result — it beat the debuts of big-budget summer movies like “Terminator Genisys” and “Mad Max: Fury Road” — positions the strongly reviewed “Straight Outta Compton” to become one of the biggest dramas of the year. It cost Universal and Legendary Entertainment about $29 million to make.
Universal’s success with “Straight Outta Compton” was a humiliation for Warner Bros., which passed on the opportunity to make the biopic. It was considered risky in part because of its racially charged subject matter.
Warner also suffered a flop over the weekend, with “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” taking in an estimated $13.5 million, according to Rentrak, which compiles box-office data. The well-reviewed “U.N.C.L.E.,” a big-screen remake of the 1960s-era spy television series, cost at least $80 million to make. Warner, which has suffered a string of disappointments this summer, spent an additional $31.2 million on 47 different “U.N.C.L.E.” television ads, according to the analytics firm iSpot.tv. (To compare, Universal spent about $23 million on 29 different television ads for “Compton,” iSpot said.)
“Straight Outta Compton,” directed by F. Gary Gray and counting Ice Cube and Dr. Dre as producers, had a troubled shoot and prompted some theaters to heighten security, in part because of recent attacks on moviegoers. But Mr. Gray’s film, which depicts police mistreatment of African-Americans in the 1980s, rolled out without significant incident — a reflection, in part, of the success of Universal marketers in tapping, but not provoking, current racial restlessness in cities across the nation.
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