By Bilge Ebiri
The Labor Day box office battle couldn’t have squared off more disparate forces: Lee Daniels’s The Butler, a solemn, White House-set biopic with high awards-season ambitions, and One Direction: This Is Us, an upbeat documentary about a boy band. While The Butler won the four-day crown with $20 million, the concert flick enjoyed a formidable Friday-to-Sunday surge, pulling in about $15.8 million. It’s the latest pop act-themed documentary to score big at theaters.
“Concert movies have clearly been on the rise in the past few years: The top five highest-grossing entries in this genre have all been released since 2008,” says Ray Subers, editor of BoxOfficeMojo.com. Before then, he says, “only two concert movies had ever been released in over 600 theaters: 1988’s U2: Rattle and Hum and 1991’s Madonna: Truth or Dare.”
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| One Direction |
“Concert movies have clearly been on the rise in the past few years: The top five highest-grossing entries in this genre have all been released since 2008,” says Ray Subers, editor of BoxOfficeMojo.com. Before then, he says, “only two concert movies had ever been released in over 600 theaters: 1988’s U2: Rattle and Hum and 1991’s Madonna: Truth or Dare.”
