The winner: Dunkirk

If Christopher Nolan’s second world war drama stunned with its £10.02m UK opening weekend, then what happened next is surely even more remarkable. Dunkirk fell only 18% for its second session, posting second-weekend takings of £8.24m. And strong weekday results last week mean that the film added £17m for the seven days since the opening frame, for a 10-day total of £27.02m.

Dunkirk’s second weekend takings are stronger than those of any title this year, apart from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast – a box-office phenomenon and the eighth biggest film of all time at UK cinemas. Before that, you’d have to go back to Warners’ Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, which took £8.89m in its second frame and went on to achieve a total of £54.6m.

Films released in the school holiday period can pile on the box office quickly, since families, or at least children, are available to go to the cinema any day of the week, rather than just at weekends. Dunkirk, however, is hardly a family film, so it’s surprising to see it perform so well on weekdays during the holiday period. Reports from cinemas are that the audience demographics are very mixed. The older (especially 60-plus) cinema-going cohort is traditionally strong on weekdays, but it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the 12A-certificate Dunkirk is also playing to families with older children.

Despicable Me 3 repels Captain Underpants

In the official comScore chart, DreamWorks Animation’s well-reviewed Captain Underpants has opened with a decent £2.50m, enough for second place in the box-office chart. It’s worth noting, however, that the film opened last Monday, so this is a seven-day figure. For the weekend, Captain Underpants grossed £1.27m, which puts it in fifth place.

Meanwhile, Universal Illumination’s Despicable Me 3 remains the top animation, falling 27% from the previous weekend, and adding £5.53m over the past seven days. Total box office so far is a chunky £35.8m. Competitor Cars 3 is down to seventh place, and has so far grossed £7.40m. It’s going to need a miracle to prevent Cars 3 from becoming Pixar’s lowest-grossing film in the UK, an honour currently held by The Good Dinosaur (£15.1m lifetime).

The magnificent seven

A blast … Girls Trip. Photograph: Short/Universal/Rex/Shutterstock

With seven films each grossing more than £1m at the weekend, there is an untypical depth in the current movie marketplace. The last time as many as seven titles took £1m on the same weekend was the final session of 2016, which was a statistical quirk: three of the films on that occasion only earned £1m for the weekend, when significant previews were added. Before that, you’d have to go all the way back to the first weekend of 2015 to find a session with as many films all earning £1m.

The seven £1m-plus titles for the current frame include Girls Trip, which offers an African American spin on the women behaving badly genre (see Bridesmaids, Bad Moms, Snatched and the soon-arriving Rough Night). Plenty of films with African American ensemble casts have struggled at the UK box office – for example Think Like a Man, which reached $92m in the US and managed just £664,000 here. Results like that can cause defeatism, so Universal deserves credit for believing in Girls Trip, which debuted with £1.16m and £1.56m including previews.

The indie alternative: The Big Sick

Sneaking into the Top 10 with debut takings of £402,000 from 160 cinemas, and £489,000 including previews, US indie comedy The Big Sick has opened with a nice screen average of £3,054. The autobiographical film, co-written by and starring Kumail Nanjiani, sparked a bidding war at Sundance in January – but the outcome of fevered Sundance purchases can often be buyer’s remorse. The Big Sick has reached a decent $30m in the US, and the UK is a key test for its appeal beyond its home market.

The market

Despite the success of Dunkirk and the wide spread of titles earning £1m or more, takings are 7% down on the previous session, and 13% down on the equivalent weekend in 2016, when Finding Dory and Jason Bourne delivered impressive opening numbers. This week’s new releases – including The Emoji Movie and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets – will have their work cut out trying to match the big movie for the first session of August 2016: Suicide Squad. Look for Dunkirk to continue to do the box office heavy lifting.

Top 10 films, 28-30 July

1. Dunkirk, £8,235,532 from 663 sites. Total: £27,017,724 (two weeks)

2. Captain Underpants, £2,495,744 from 556 sites (new)

3. Despicable Me 3, £2,250,597 from 632 sites. Total: £35,851,868 (five weeks)

4. War for the Planet of the Apes, £1,656,290 from 591 sites. Total: £16,240,721 (three weeks)

5. Spider-Man: Homecoming, £1,560,458 from 548 sites. Total: £24,540,721 (four weeks)

6. Girls Trip, £1,557,981 from 345 sites (new)

7. Cars 3, £1,013,547 from 606 sites. Total: £7,403,511 (three weeks)

8. 47 Metres Down, £637,964 from 392 sites (new)

9. Baby Driver, £517,790 from 388 sites. Total: £11,136,383 (five weeks)

10. The Big Sick, £488,718 from 160 sites (new)

Other openers

Mubarakan, £113,742 from 69 sites

Wish Upon, £38,620 from 125 sites

Hounds of Love, £21,150 from 32 sites

The Wall, £16,914 sites from 84 sites

The Farthest, £16,299 from six sites (Ireland only)

Howards End, £14,503 from 13 sites (reissue)

Vekh Baaratan Challiyan, £10,650 from four sites

Queerama, £459 from one site