Straight Outta Compton dominated the weekend box office, setting new August record

The N.W.A. biopic Straight Outta Compton earned $56.1 million on opening weekend, the top draw by far and the biggest debut ever for an R-rated film in August, topping American Pie 2. This was especially impressive given that the movie cost only $29 million to make. That's great news for Ice Cube and Dr. Dre, who helped produce the movie about their seminal gangsta rap group, and for Universal Studios, which has now scored massive hits with nine out of the 10 films they have released this year.

With Compton, Universal has hauled in $5.76 billion in box office receipts worldwide in 2015 — which, The Wall Street Journal notes, beats the full-year record of $5.52 billion set by Twentieth Century Fox in 2014. In second place last weekend was Mission Impossible — Rogue Nation, which earned $17 million in its third weekend, and in a disappointing third place was The Man From U.N.C.L.E., a $75 million movie from Warner Bros. that earned only $13.5 million in its opening weekend.

Straight Outta Compton "tapped into something in our culture and that made it more of a must-see," said Phil Contrino, chief analyst at BoxOffice.com. You can watch more about the movie and its opening-weekend competitors in the Reuters report below. Peter Weber

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