The winner: Don’t Breathe

With Sausage Party retaining the top spot at the UK box office, several new releases battled for second place. Honours go to Ben-Hur, with £1.05m from 509 cinemas, but that number includes Wednesday and Thursday previews totalling £265,000. Strip those out, and Ben-Hur’s tally falls to £783,000. Don’t Breathe earned all its £1.03m opening number from the three-day weekend period.

Don’t Breathe is shaping up to be highly profitable. Production budget is a reported $10m, and the film has already grossed $67m in the US. The UK opening number isn’t anything special – Warners’ Lights Out debuted a few weeks ago with £1.13m – and was probably hit by the sunny weather on Sunday. On the other hand, rain on Saturday gave all films a boost.

The loser: Ben-Hur

Ben-Hur’s weekend takings of £783,000 would have put it in fifth place for the weekend period, behind Sausage Party, Don’t Breathe, Bad Moms and Kubo and the Two Strings. Production budget is a reported $100m.

Even if previews are added to Ben-Hur’s opening tally, 56 films have opened bigger in the UK so far in 2016, and its box office is far from the blockbuster numbers it needs to achieve profitability. US box office is a calamitous $26m so far, but foreign is helping to stem the losses, with decent numbers in Brazil and Mexico.

Laika dips with Kubo

September has traditionally been Universal’s favoured slot for a Laika animation, with Kubo and the Two Strings following the pattern set in 2012 by ParaNorman and in 2014 by The Boxtrolls. (Coraline, in 2009, was a May release in the UK.) Kids are back at school, and competition from other family films is less intense. ParaNorman debuted with £1.39m, and The Boxtrolls with £1.31m plus £689,000 in previews. Coraline was even stronger, beginning with £1.56m plus £872,000 in previews. Kubo falls below these earlier Laika hits, with a debut of £844,000 from 520 cinemas.

Bad Moms and David Brent: a tale of two comedies

With third-weekend takings of £898,000, Bad Moms falls just 22%, the smallest decline of any film in the Top 10. This follows a drop of just 5% in the previous session. Compare that with the performance of David Brent: Life on the Road, which has been on release one week longer, and has fallen by 65%, 63% and now 82%. You’d expect bigger drops for a film based on a familiar character, as fans will tend to rush out and see it in the first week of release. Still, Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa achieved a final box office of £6.17m, after a debut of £1.43m plus previews – a multiple of 4.3 times its opening. David Brent kicked off with £1.45m plus negligible previews, and is looking set for a lifetime total of about £3.7m – a multiple of just 2.6 times the opening number.

Bad Moms (£5.74m so far) is an interesting case in that the film was not glowingly reviewed but is winning UK audiences. While comedy Sausage Party is providing some competition, Bad Moms faces more of a challenge with the arrival this week of the female-skewing Bridget Jones’s Baby.

Julieta cracks £1m

In 2015, for the first time in many years, no non-Bollywood foreign language film earned £1m at the UK box office; top title was Argentina’s Wild Tales, with £728,000. That result provoked plenty of gloomy analysis of the seemingly beleaguered foreign-language sector. So the arthouse realm will take cheer from the fact that Julieta has now passed £1m – the first non-Bollywood foreign-language film to do so since The Raid 2 in 2014.

With £1.08m including Monday’s takings, Julieta is neck and neck with The Raid 2, and has overtaken 2013’s The Great Beauty. This means it is set to be the UK’s biggest-grossing non-Bollywood foreign language film since the French mismatched-buddy comedy Untouchable, in September 2012 (£2.04m).

Hell or High Water is director’s biggest debut

Over 14 years, director David Mackenzie has delivered pictures admired to greater (Young Adam, Hallam Foe) and lesser (Spread, You Instead) degrees. But box office success has tended to elude him. In 2014, Starred Up brought a commercial breakthrough, achieving UK cinema takings of just over £1.5m, following a debut of £495,000 (including £17,000 previews) from 316 cinemas.

Now the critically admired Hell or High Water, starring Chris Pine, Ben Foster and Jeff Bridges, raises the bar again, starting its UK run with £552,000 (including £36,000 previews) from 264 cinemas.

Hell or High Water faced direct competition from Captain Fantastic and Anthropoid, two films that similarly straddled the indie/commercial divide. Anthropoid, which began with £228,000 (including £7,000 previews) from 132 cinemas, delivered by far the biggest box office so far for director Sean Ellis (Metro Manila). Captain Fantastic, with a tighter release at 105 carefully selected venues, achieved the highest screen average of the three films, with £2,092 (if previews of £61,000 are excluded from its £281,000 total).

Nick Cave documentary burns brightly

Initially conceived as a filmed performance of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ new album Skeleton Tree, One More Time With Feeling was originally set to play cinemas only on September 8, the day before the record’s release. The creative evolution of the film under Andrew Dominik’s direction, and acclaim at the Venice film festival, helped the picture achieve significant encore showings over the weekend. Total box office for the four days is £343,000 in the UK, and $1.7m across the globe.

The future

Largely due to the underperformance of Ben-Hur, takings are 29% down on the equivalent session from 2015, when a double ration of Tom Hardy in Legend led the box office charge. This ends a nine-week run where box office was either ahead or level with the 2015 equivalent weekends. Cinema bookers are now hoping that the arrival of two belated sequels – Bridget Jones’s Baby and Blair Witch – can remedy the situation this weekend. Alternatives include Bryan Cranston in crime thriller The Infiltrator and the widely admired New Zealand comedy Hunt for the Wilderpeople. Thursday sees several hundred cinemas nationwide play the Ron Howard-directed The Beatles: Eight Days a Week – The Touring Years, followed by a more focused full release from Friday.

Top 10 films, 9-11 September

1. Sausage Party, £1,219,972 from 533 sites. Total: £5,290,877

2. Ben-Hur, £1,047,800 from 509 sites (new)

3. Don’t Breathe, £1,028,938 from 446 sites (new)

4. Bad Moms, £898,450 from 448 sites. Total: £5,738,313

5. Kubo and the Two Strings, £844,027 from 520 sites (new)

6. Finding Dory, £718,508 from 549 sites. Total: £40,096,594

7. Hell Or High Water, £552,230 from 264 sites (new)

8. Brotherhood, £465,031 from 237 sites. Total: £2,910,640

9. The BFG, £332,704 from 468 sites. Total: £29,197,858

10. Suicide Squad, £313,292 from 362 sites. Total: £33,191,023

Other openers

Captain Fantastic, £280,614 (including £60,926 previews) from 105 sites

Anthropoid, £227,591 (including 7,054 previews) from 132 sites

Baar Baar Dekho, £156,337 from 66 sites

Janaan, £49,678 from 39 sites

Iru Mugan, £44,562 from 29 sites

Freaky Ali, £16,562 from 15 sites

The Man Who Fell to Earth, £16,353 from 14 sites

Theo and Hugo, £8,874 (including £3,082 previews) from four sites

The Blue Room, £4,136 from nine sites

Line Walker, £1,307 from two sites

The Land of the Enlightened, £459 from two sites

Marubhoomiyile Aana, £262 from two sites

• Thanks to comScore. All figures relate to takings in UK and Ireland cinemas.