Ride Along 2 rolls past Revenant, Force Awakens

Proving Oscar nominations and buzz mean little in the way of actual audience interest, Kevin Hart and Ice Cube — two actors under the current Academy Awards regime all but assured to never hear their names called as Oscar winners — drove away to the bank with another box office win.

Ride Along 2 rolled to an estimated $34 million, good enough to beat out the Oscar front-runner The Revenant and Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

For Hart, Ride Along 2 marked the seventh of eight films he’s headlined to earn at least $20 million. Ride Along 2 is his second highest opening trailing only its predecessor, which earned $41.5 million.

With a field-leading 12 Oscar nominations, The Revenant came in at second with $29.5 million to bring its domestic haul to $87.7 million. It’s why Oscar critics lament the lack of diversity in the field. Even if films like Creed and Straight Outta Compton didn’t win the awards, nominations clearly put more eyeballs on a film audiences might have missed earlier.

Fortunately for both films, they proved profitable without the Oscars rub with Creed earning $107 million (off a $35 million budget) and Compton earned $161 million (off a $28 million budget).

Dropping from its top spot perch for the first time in over a month, Force Awakens fell to third place with an estimated $32 million. That brings its domestic total to $856 million. Looking to tap into the same demographic that made American Sniper such a hit last year, 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, opened to a decent $16 million debut.

Daddy’s Home wrapped up the Top 5 with $9.3 million giving the Will Farrell and Mark Wahlberg comedy a total gross of $129 million.