No Good Deed knocks down Guardians at the box office

Los Angeles — It took a murderous Idris Elba and a pair of dolphin buddies to defeat Guardians of the Galaxy at movie theaters.

The Sony thriller No Good Deed, which stars Elba as an escaped convict and Taraji P. Henson as the innocent he terrorizes, opened on top of the box office with $24.5m, according to studio estimates Sunday. And Sony wasn't surprised.



"It's a movie that we really loved and felt that it was going to win," said Sony distribution chief Rory Bruer. "You have to give it to the cast in Idris and Taraji. Their chemistry together is fantastic."

The film nearly doubled its reported budget in its first week of release, said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for box-office tracker Rentrak.

"It's the first brand-new post summer release to really catch on," he said.

The Warner Bros.' feel-good film Dolphin Tale 2 debuted in second place with $16.5m. The family-friendly story stars Morgan Freeman and Ashley Judd reprising their roles from the 2011 original.



Guardians slipped to third place with $8m in ticket sales. The Marvel space adventure, which held the No. 1 spot for four weeks, is the top-grossing film of the year domestically, collecting more than $300m in North America and $600m worldwide.

Paramount's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles finished fourth with $4.8m, followed by the Fox comedy Let's Be Cops, which collected $4.3m.

Fox Searchlight's crime drama The Drop, which stars Tom Hardy and the late James Gandolfini, opened in sixth place with $4.2m — an impressive showing given it only played in 809 theaters.