The winner

Whichever way you look at it, studio Fox has succeeded in positioning Dawn of the Planet of the Apes as a bigger movie event than its 2011 predecessor, Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Dawn's opening weekend of £7.1m plus £1.61m in previews compares with £4.73m plus £1.1m in previews for Rise. But it's in the overall context that Dawn really scores. In summer 2011, Rise scored the sixth-biggest opening of the summer (excluding previews), behind the final Harry Potter film, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, The Hangover Part II, Transformers: Dark of the Moon and The Inbetweeners Movie. This year, if previews are similarly excluded, Dawn has posted the second biggest opening of the summer so far – and, in fact, of the year – behind only X-Men: Days of Future Past, with £7.55m plus £1.59m in previews.

Three years ago, Fox was attempting to reboot a seemingly ailing franchise that had come unstuck with Tim Burton's less-than-fully-achieved 2001 Planet of the Apes. With Rise, it delivered a film that enjoys a robust 7.6 IMDb user rating and a decent 68/100 score at MetaCritic. The film's final UK gross of £20.77m is a healthy 4.4 times its opening weekend figure – suggesting solid appreciation by cinemagoers. Dawn is now building on that platform.

The loss of James Franco from the franchise, with lesser-known star Jason Clarke now performing the lead human character, has had no impact. Fox savvily moved Andy Serkis' simian character Caesar into pole position, building on fan appreciation for him in Rise. Fox executives will happily note that future sequels are not dependent on rich pay deals for surviving cast members, suggesting Apes as that rare blockbuster asset that is not weighed down by significant profit participants. On the other hand, it's questionable whether audiences would line up so enthusiastically for more Caesar films that lack Serkis' digitally captured performance.

• Dawn of the Planet of the Apes: the ape of things to come
• Peter Bradshaw reviews Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The live events

If anyone is still in doubt about the growing appeal of live performances beamed to UK cinemas, they need only consider the events of the past week. First, on Thursday, Skylight at London's Wyndham's theatre, delivered £826,000. Two days later, Andre Rieu's summer concert from Maastricht in the Netherlands eclipsed it with £831,000. And then on Sunday, Monty Python at London's O2 recorded a UK gross of £1.18m. Over this period, these presentations were exceeded in takings by only three films at UK cinemas: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, How to Train Your Dragon 2 and Transformers: Age of Extinction.

Because live events play not just in cinemas but also multi-purpose venues that don't traditionally play films, getting a fully accurate picture of grosses for event cinema can be a challenge. Picturehouse Entertainment, global distributor of the Monty Python show, puts UK takings for Sunday at £1.26m, around £80,000 higher than official data reporter Rentrak. The company says that with advance sales for encore showings added in, the Python gross currently stands at £1.64m. That places Python fourth in the all-time chart for event cinema, behind the National Theatre's War Horse, the Gielgud theatre's The Audience and the BBC's Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor.

A year ago, Rieu's summer Maastricht concert delivered £455,000 in the UK – a previous best for the Dutch violinist and conductor – so his camp will be happy to have nearly doubled that amount this time. Picturehouse, which is co-distributing Skylight with National Theatre Live, says that with advance bookings for encore shows, the gross stands at over £1m for the David Hare play, which is directed by Stephen Daldry and stars Carey Mulligan and Bill Nighy.

Films across UK cinemas will have lost showtimes to both Rieu and Python on Saturday and Sunday, so weekend box-office should be viewed through that prism. The effect would probably be disproportionate on the arthouse sector, since independent cinema chains have enthusiastically embraced this type of content.

• Michael Billington on Skylight
• Peter Bradshaw on Monty Python

The alternative winner

With takings of £312,000, exactly the same as its opening frame a week ago (excluding previews), Richard Linklater's Boyhood is the title exhibiting the strongest staying power in the top 10. Part of the reason is the film's greater penetration in multiplex venues, moving up from 89 hand-picked sites for the opening to a broader 159 cinemas this time.

However, it's holding well in its original venues. For example, London's Curzon Soho, the top site so far for Boyhood, reports only an 11% drop, with second-weekend takings there of £11,200 and a cumulative audience to date of over £34,000. Picturehouse reports that the film dropped just 24% across its sites, delivering a £3,400 screen average within the boutique chain, and number two in market share for the film this past weekend (behind Cineworld). Only one Linklater film, School of Rock, has grossed more than £1m in the UK. With £897,000 so far, Boyhood is clearly going to sail past that benchmark. With little strong competition in the arthouse space, both currently and in the imminent future, distributor Universal has justifiable hopes of achieving a big multiple of the Boyhood opening number.

• Peter Bradshaw's Boyhood review – one of the great films of the decade
• Boyhood has 100% on Rotten Tomatoes: lettuce see what that means

The also-ran

Landing in seventh place (or fifth if you discount the chart's live events), Pudsey the Dog: the Movie achieved £446,000 from 407 cinemas, just about scraping up a screen average above £1,000, albeit thanks to previews of £61,000. Backers Vertigo managed to get the film into cinemas a little more than two years after Pudsey and owner Ashleigh won Britain's Got Talent in May 2012, but it's fair to conclude that fan excitement for the dog-trick act has somewhat cooled in the interim. The July cinema date suggests a November DVD release, and Pudsey could yet prove a popular gift item this Christmas.

• Peter Bradshaw on Pudsey the Dog: The Movie – a shame for everyone involved
• How I played a dream sequence sausage in Pudsey the Dog: The Movie

The big faller

Thanks to six days of previews, Transformers: Age of Extinction posted an inflated £11.75m opening on its debut frame. In its second session, it falls to £1.79m. Casting aside the preview takings from the calculations, the film has dropped a more reasonable 52%, although it's worth remarking that this number still represents the biggest fall of any film in the top 10. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes clearly offered direct and hefty competition for the blockbuster-attuned audience. How to Train Your Dragon 2, falling 36%, exhibited stronger staying power, and rises above Transformers in the chart. With £12.86m so far, the DreamWorks Animation sequel is chasing a £17.37m total for 2010 original How to Train Your Dragon.

• Chinese farmers quit fields to build giant Transformers models
• Dragon 2's Jay Baruchel interview: 'We're being reduced to a planet of serfs'

The future

Significantly thanks to Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, overall the market is a healthy 68% up on the equivalent weekend from 2013, when Edgar Wright's The World's End was the top new title. However, cinemas face more challenging times in the near future, ever since Warner Bros late in the day moved the Wachowskis' Jupiter Ascending off the July 25 date. Nothing of equivalent scale has come in to replace it, so cinema bookers will be hoping for the best this weekend with Brett Ratner's Hercules, starring Dwayne Johnson, and genre sequel The Purge: Anarchy. There's also family adventure Earth to Echo in the mix, and arthouse audiences will be looking to David Gordon Green's Joe, starring Nicolas Cage and Mud's Tye Sheridan.

• Joe – first look review
• The Purge: Anarchy - Six of the worst masked men in horror

Top 10 films July 18-20

1. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, £8,705,995 from 561 sites (new)

2. How to Train Your Dragon 2, £1,877,346 from 572 sites. Total: £12,864,015

3. Transformers: Age of Extinction, £1,790,491 from 514 sites. Total: £15,516,101

4. Monty Python: O2 London (live event), £1,178,091 from 520 sites (new)

5. Andre Rieu's 2014 Maastricht Concert (live event): £830,586 from 395 sites (new)

6. Mrs Brown's Boys D'Movie, £559,173 from 425 sites. Total: £13,263,304

7. Pudsey the Dog: The Movie, £446,450 from 407 sites (new)

8. Boyhood, £312,255 from 159 sites. Total: £896,723

9. The Fault in Our Stars, £278,559 from 379 sites. Total: £10,570,369

10. 22 Jump Street, £224,783 from 255 sites. Total: £18,035,241

Other openers

Velaiyilla Pattathari, £33,219 from 8 sites

Finding Vivian Maier, £30,365 from 25 sites

Some Like It Hot, £12,869 from 22 sites (rerelease)

I Am Divine, £10,592 from 14 sites

Grand Central, £6,707 from 10 sites

Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon, £4,097 from 12 sites

Norte: The End of History, £1,233 from three sites

Jealousy, £242 from two sites

• Thanks to Rentrak