Pixar’s first princess takes her place at the summit of the chart in a busy weekend at the UK Box Office.

1. Brave (553 sites) W/E: £5,269,402 Total: £8,270,546

2. The Bourne Legacy (498) W/E: £4,620,289 (NEW, Includes M – Th previews)

3. Ted (462) W/E: £2,076,046 Total: £22,186,549

4. The Expendables 2 (451) W/E: £1,985,082 (New, Includes Th previews)

5. The Dark Knight Rises (440) W/E: £1,506,178 Total: £49,776,391

6. Ek Tha Tiger (68) W/E: £543,073 (NEW, Includes W/Th previews)

6. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days (463) W/E: £459,526 Total: £5,229,266

8. Ice Age 4: Continental Drift (413) W/E: £350,788 Total: £27,603,587

9. Step Up 4: Miami Heat (394) W/E: £340,072 Total: £1,797,048

10. The Wedding Video (347) W/E: £333,079 NEW

Source: The Guardian

Having followed the same oddly staggered release pattern which Ice Age 4 tried last month, Brave has been bubbling away at the Box Office since the start of the month, however, with a full week of English and Welsh takings adding to its weekend gross from Scotland and Ireland – the film having opened unconventionally on a Monday – Brave storms up the chart from its mid-level position last time around. The market is still very much ready for kids fare and with Ice Age and Wimpy Kid starting to look a little stagnate, the market was there for Brave despite apparently dicey prospects due to its female led nature, something which this opening, along with the performance of other Disney films such as Tangled and Enchanted over the last few years, should be questioned less often than it is. We’ve a couple of weeks before the kids go back to school and screen space starts getting squeezed out for them  but with nearly £10 million banked already, Disney are on for solid dividends though they’ve got an awful lot of ground to make up on Ice Age, which has had more time and less competition, to make nearly £30 million. Something I’m not sure Brave can do. Still for one of the “riskier” Pixar projects of recent memory, it’s a fine performance thus far.

The Bourne Legacy opens OK enough in second place but considering the additional 4 days of previews it had contributing to this total, it’s not looking as strong as I’m sure Universal would have been hoping for. The weather last week was a mixed bag so I’m not sure how much sunny skies can be blamed for this but its started weaker out of the gate than the previous two installments, though in Jeremy Renner it has a lot less star power than Matt Damon was able to offer. Still, prospects could still be OK for the next couple of weeks and its the kind of film with a slightly more intellectual bent than most blockbusters which looks to do better during weekdays when older audiences tend to get out to the cinema.

After a fairly large drop last week, Ted stabilises in its 3rd run in the chart with takings dropping a bit over a third but in an environment which has seen 2 major new releases and one expansion, this is a pretty great result. Crossing over £20 million in the comedy genre is a rare feat indeed, and especially for an original IP, but this film has done so handily turning into one of the real dark horses of the summer, making a lot of money but not having to do all that much to propel it. It’s a water cooler talk dream, with hot stars and a USP which is pretty hard to beat from a marketing point of view. It certainly weathered the storm of homegrown comedy The Wedding Video which debuted at number 10 with takings that feel lacking given the marketing and what seems to be general goodwill for that film overall.

Speaking of disappointing, affection doesn’t seem to be in abundance for The Expendables 2, which admittedly had 3 less days to make money than The Bourne Legacy but certainly had a starrier cast. A less than £2 million opening, around half what the original film managed, will not be what Lionsgate wanted to hear at all with what is really their big play for the summer. Blame can likely be attributed to the competition, and indeed if this had opened a weekend earlier we could have had bigger business even with the Olympics finishing up. This isn’t the type of film that generally holds up well in charts either so this may see a swift cut in screen count unless it can perform well this coming weekend.

The Dark Knight Rises drops less than a third, good news for Warners who, with what will be over £50 million banked by the time of writing, will be very happy with what they have here, even if they won’t match those pesky Avengers. New Bollywood entry Ek Tha Tiger gets a high per-screen average as is becoming fast the case for this market, one which looks to be getting ever bigger and this also marks the biggest opening gross for Bollywood this year, though it did have help from 2 days of previews.

The rest of the chart sees aforementioned kids films and The Wedding Video along with an around 50% drop for the latest Step Up which seems to have been met with little enthusiasm and along with the performance of StreetDance 2 in the Easter period earlier this year likely shows that this little genre is done for now at least.

Coming up this week is a real mixed bag of quality and likely shit. James Marsh’s latest Shadow Dancer and fantastic documentary The Imposter doing battle with The Three Stooges and the frankly baffling, practical-joke looking Keith Lemon: The Film, which personally I hope involves Lemon pointing and laughing at the audience while eating a banana for 90 minutes. It will probably be huge…