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Pirates In-Arrr-guably the Weekend’s Top Movie

Ahoy there, ye readers! Hoping ye had a hearty holiday weekend. Many a mate stopped swabbin’ the deck and steered their ship leeward toward the movie theater, spending many a doubloon.

And what movie did those landlubbers favor? Shiver me timbers! ‘Twas Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales! Johnny Depp’s latest yarn fired a shot across the bow at the cinematic fleet giving chase, sending those scallywags running, lest they be sent to Davy Jones’ locker.

Just how many pieces o’ eight did Pirates make off with? Why, $62.6 million or thereabouts for the traditional three-day weekend, according to early estimates. Throw in Memorial Day, and Pirates earned Disney $77 million, which the studio will surely bury on a desert isle somewhere. A haul like that would make anyone jolly, Roger!

Another band o’ do-gooding buccaneers—the eclectic space rogues from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2—gave Disney the second-place medal, too. The superhero flick banked $20.6 million during the three-day weekend, pushing its domestic total to $338.5 million. That’s good enough for second place on the year, though it’s still well back of 2017’s No. 1 flick, Beauty and the Beast ($500.9 million).

Oh, and with that formidable one-two punch of Guardians and Beauty, and with the strong debut of Pirates, Disney has already earned more than $1 billion domestically this year.

Disney’s success makes me wonder whether Zac Efron wish he was back with the Mouse House. Efron’s latest film, Baywatch, spent the weekend thrashing in the turgid box-office waters, earning just $18.6 million and leaving studio execs scanning the horizon for some form of rescue. Even Dwayne Johnson, arguably the planet’s most bankable star, couldn’t save this reboot from the sharks. Perhaps Efron might consider  reading the script for High School Musical: The Millennial Years?

Alien: Covenant, last week’s No. 1, lost 70% of its audience and tumbled all the way down to fourth. It earned $10.6 million, which just might be more frightening than the movie itself. Meanwhile, Everything, Everything closed out the Top Five with a $6 million weekend.