'Transformers: Last Knight' tops box office with $43.5M, a franchise low

Jake Coyle | The Associated Press

Show Caption Hide Caption Trailer: 'Transformers: The Last Knight' With Optimus Prime searching the cosmos for the Creators, a new alien threat arrives on Earth.

NEW YORK — The hulking machines of Transformers are no longer box-office behemoths in North America. But they're still big in China.

Michael Bay's Transformers: The Last Knight, the fifth installment in the series, scored a franchise-low domestic debut with an estimated $43.5 million in ticket sales for the weekend and a five-day total of $69.1 million since Wednesday.

All previous Transformers sequels opened with $97 million-plus.

But The Last Knight, the second Transformers movie to star Mark Wahlberg, still showed its might overseas. It took in $196.2 million internationally, including an impressive $123.4 million in China.

Future business will tell whether those grosses are enough to cover a hugely expensive movie: $217 million to make, plus nearly as much to market. Studios reap a smaller percentage of ticket sales from Chinese theaters. And reviews — though never much of a factor in Transformers land — were worse for The Last Knight than the earlier films. Audiences gave this one a B-plus at CinemaScore.

Yet Transformers has been increasingly skewing international. The previous film, 2014's Age of Extinction, made $858.6 million of its $1.1 billion global haul abroad.

"Transformers is built for a global audience," said Kyle Davies, president of distribution for Paramount. "You really have to consider how we did in the overall, and it was really strong overseas and in China. That's how we treat Transformers: It's a global property. So we're hopeful that we're going to get to a good place."

Wonder Woman and Pixar's animated Cars 3 tied for second place, both with $25.2 million. Nearly a month after opening, Patty Jenkins' Wonder Woman, starring Gal Gadot, continues to be a major draw. In four weeks, it has surpassed $300 million domestically. At $652.9 million globally, it's the highest-grossing film directed by a woman, not accounting for inflation.

Fourth place went to Mandy Moore shark thriller 47 Meters Down, with $7.4 million. Tupac Shakur biopicAll Eyez On Me fell to fifth with $5.9 million.

In limited release, Kumail Nanjiani's acclaimed romantic comedy The Big Sick landed the best per-screen average of the year. It opened in five theaters, grossing an average of $87,000 from each. Amazon plunked down $12 million for the Judd Apatow-produced Sundance Film Festival hit.

Sofia Coppola's The Beguiled wasn't far behind. In four theaters, it earned a per-screen average of $60,000. The film, starring Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst and Colin Farrell, is a remake of 1971 Civil War-era gothic thriller about a wounded Union soldier (Clint Eastwood) taken in by a Southern all-girls school. At Cannes Film Festival last month, Coppola won best director, becoming only the second woman to do so.

Final figures are expected Monday.

Contributing: Kim Willis