Captain America storms back to the top of the UK box office

The winner

Returning to the top spot in its third week of release, Captain America: The Winter Soldier adds £3.69m in the last seven days, for a 19-day total of £14.62m. That's enough to put it past the lifetime totals of the original Captain America film (£9.48m) and the first Thor picture (£14.04m). Films in the Marvel Avengers universe have now spent a total of 16 weeks at the summit of the UK box office (not counting Hulk or The Incredible Hulk), grossing a collective £185m.

This is only the second time so far this year that a film has topped the chart with takings of less than £2m – or the third time if Need for Speed's preview takings are discounted from its opening tally of £2.01m. The other instance was The Grand Budapest Hotel nabbing the top spot in its third week of play, where it faced an exceptionally weak field of new releases. It's likely that all films in the market were affected by sunny skies across much of the UK. Families with long Easter holidays to fill, in particular, may have postponed cinema visits until cloudier days materialise.

The genre contender

With Rio 2, Noah and Divergent all hitting cinemas the previous weekend in time for the Easter school holiday, and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 arriving imminently, cinemas paused for breath in the session just ended, with a relatively niche set of new entrants. Hammer followed up its smash The Woman in Black with the more low-key, 1974-set The Quiet Ones, featuring mid-level cast Sam Claflin, Jared Harris and Olivia Cooke. An OK £681,000 debut from a wide 397 screens, including £113,000 in previews, resulted. The Woman in Black began in February 2012 with a much more muscular £3.15m, but that film had much stronger marketable elements, including the Susan Hill source material and star Daniel Radcliffe fresh from Harry Potter glories.

The local hit

Landing a couple of places behind The Quiet Ones, Calvary kicks off with a solid £571,000 from 150 sites, yielding the highest screen average (£3,810) of any film on release. It's worth noting that a big chunk of that total – €357,000 (£295,000) – comes from cinemas in Ireland, where Calvary delivered the third-biggest opening of the year. (Irish takings are reported by data collectors Rentrak together with the UK as a single territory.)

Comparisons with John Michael McDonagh's previous film The Guard are tricky, since that film enjoyed a staggered release, debuting in Ireland only with £474,000 from 71 cinemas, including £72,000 in previews, and then six weeks later in the UK with £164,000 from 60 venues. By that time, the Irish gross was already up to £3.34m.

The bloody import

Third of the major new releases was The Raid 2, arriving in eighth place with a solid £454,000 from 233 sites, including previews of £47,000. Learning from the performance of its predecessor, the film was better targeted than the original Raid movie, which went out to a wider 297 screens, grossing £418,000, including £28,000 in previews. The Raid contracted to 239 cinemas on its second weekend of play, so its fair to assume that this time around the distributor omitted 60 cinemas that simply hadn't worked for the original film.

Ignoring hits from specialised distributors serving the UK's Indian and Pakistani communities, The Raid 2 instantly becomes the top foreign-language film of the year so far, targeting UK audiences of all origins and ethnicities. Previous best was Yves Saint Laurent, with £332,000. In 2012, the original Raid proved the third-biggest non-Bollywood foreign-language film of the year, with £1.09m, behind Untouchable and Headhunters.

The art-house alternative

With Calvary playing to the specialised market outside Ireland, and The Grand Budapest Hotel nudging £10m in its sixth week of play, adding another £720,000 in the past seven days, smaller releases courted the arthouse audience with varying degrees of success. The Double fell an OK 46%, and a screen average of £1,531 should be strong enough for it to hold on to most of its sites and showtimes for a third weekend. Potential crowdpleaser The Lunchbox arrived with a creditable £85,000 from 28 cinemas, including £22,000 in previews. Most of the latter were earned from special "taster" screenings last Thursday, where cinemagoers received their own lunchbox with Indian snacks. Top site was Curzon Soho, and including Monday takings the gross stands at £97,000.

The casualties

Although no major blockbuster was released at the weekend, the field of new contenders was wide and varied, with inevitable casualties. Khumba: A Zebra's Tale never looked like top choice for families already served by Rio 2 (from the animation house that makes Ice Age), Muppets Most Wanted, as well as veterans The Lego Movie and Mr Peabody & Sherman, now respectively in their ninth and tenth week of release. Khumba landed below all those films, in 14th place in the box-office chart, with a weak £90,000 from 224 cinemas. However, school holidays have a knack of being kind to also-ran contenders, which can pick up as families eventually run out of other alternatives, especially if the trailer plays to audiences attending the top-choice titles.

Performing even worse than Khumba, The Last Days on Mars landed with a thud in 20th place, with £47,000 from 204 cinemas. This debut feature from Ireland's Ruairi Robinson premiered last year in one of the sidebars of the Cannes film festival, conferring art-house credentials that seemed to be confirmed by a classy cast including Liev Schreiber, Elias Koteas, Romola Garai and Olivia Williams. But a horror/sci-fi storyline pushed it towards a genre positioning, which can be a dangerous no-man's land unless supported either by strongly positive reviews or highly visible marketing. Neither were much in evidence.

The future

Thanks to those sunny skies and the lack of commercially potent new fare, overall box office was down 21% on the equivalent frame from 2013, when Tom Cruise starrer Oblivion landed in the top spot. Salvation is immediately at hand with the arrival this week of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, which currently enjoys an IMDb user rating of 8.1/10 and a MetaCritic score of 58/100. Looking for counter-programming opportunities are middle-aged-skewing heist caper The Love Punch, with Emma Thompson and Pierce Brosnan; high-concept Tom Hardy one-man show Locke; and Sweden's Lukas Moodysson (Together) returning to crowdpleasing form with We Are the Best!. Magic Magic is a hard-to-categorise Argentina-set road movie with Michael Cera, Juno Temple and Emily Browning.

Top 10 films 11-13 April

1. Captain America: The Winter Soldier, £1,782,201 from 517 sites. Total: £14,618,819

2. Noah, £1,591,916 from 478 sites. Total: £5,868,788

3. Rio 2, £1,559,793 from 558 sites. Total: £6,763,364

4. Divergent, £1,003,202 from 472 sites. Total: £4,013,006

5. The Quiet Ones, £681,305 from 397 sites (New)

6. Muppets Most Wanted, £602,305 from 547 sites. Total: £5,086,623

7. Calvary, £571,489 from 150 sites (New)

8. The Raid 2, £454,150 from 233 sites (New)

9. The Grand Budapest Hotel, £332,145 from 304 sites. Total: £9,872,335

10. The Lego Movie, £196,050 from 397 sites. Total: £32,512,022

Other openers

Khumba: A Zebra's Tale, £90,465 from 224 sites

The Lunchbox, £85,139 from 28 sites

Bhoothnath Returns, £61,353 from 41 sites

Disco Singh, £50,336 from 15 sites

The Last Days on Mars, £46,925 from 204 sites

Half of a Yellow Sun, £32,473 from 17 sites

Naan Sigappu Manithan, £12,168 from 11 sites

Pioneer, £2,270 from 20 sites

The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears, £2,205 from 5 sites

The King & The Mockingbird, £1,245 from 6 sites

Willow and Wind, £801 from 1 site (single showing)

Thanks to Rentrak