How Dunkirk, Summer’s Boldest Box-Office Gamble, Paid Off

When Warner Bros. first announced that it was releasing Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk in July, the mid-summer timing inspired some head scratching in Hollywood. Why open a period war movie in the middle of popcorn season? Surely a grim battle tale belongs sometime after the leaves turn brown, the heat kicks on, and the gold of an Oscar statuette is clearly in sight.

But the off-season strategy appears to have worked. Dunkirk made $50.5 million in the U.S. and Canada this weekend, putting its domestic opening comfortably ahead of franchise movies that seemed tailor-made for summer, like Universal’s The Mummy ($31.7 million), Fox’s Alien: Covenant ($36.2 million), and Paramount’s Transformers: The Last Knight ($44.7 million). It opened well ahead of tracking numbers that suggested a debut closer to $40 million, which would have been Nolan’s lowest opening in a decade.......

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