The winner

Lucy’s impressive global run was halted in its tracks this week by the latest off the young-adult adaptation conveyor belt, The Maze Runner. Running a touch ahead of expectations, its No 1 US opening weekend ($32.5m; £19.8m) still looks pretty modest beside other recent YA debutants: the first Twilight kicked off with $69.6m, The Hunger Games earned $152.5m and, earlier this year, Divergent and The Fault in Our Stars managed $54.6m and $48m apiece. What should buoy Fox are The Maze Runner’s perky international figures, starting last week in central America and south-east Asia. It added more than 40 territories this frame, outperforming both The Hunger Games and Divergent’s debuts in the key territories of South Korea ($5.5m) and Russia ($5.5m), and winding up No 1 in 50 countries. Maybe what did the trick was switching things up by using a mostly male cast in the so far predominantly female YA arena; the striking labyrinth imagery of the trailer, and canny timing in the post-summer window, will also have helped. Fox were feeling sufficiently confident after this weekend’s results to pencil in 18 September next year for the sequel.

The runner-up

Before the McConaissance was the ReNeesonce. But now it looks as though Liam Neeson’s late-afternoon career rebirth as a man of action could be waning – despite a decent crop of reviews for the 1990s-set NYC crime thriller A Walk Among the Tombstones. An $18.1m US debut was enough, with $5m additional overseas gross, to lodge it in second place on the global chart in a week without a true juggernaut release. But in actuality it’s a disappointment, easily the weakest in Neeson’s run as the baby-boomers’ own blarney-spritzed Charles Bronson, which began with Taken (a $24.7m US opening in 2009) and was still looking hale enough in this year’s US air-marshall jaunt Non-Stop ($28.1m US opening, and hovering just outside this week’s global top 10 thanks to a belated Chinese opening). The Irish actor has been building his global-star credentials, but Tombstones – directed by the Out of Sight scripter Scott Frank – is in danger of failing to capitalise by falling between two stools: too far from marketable genre-film hooks and not quite close enough to Neeson’s character-actor home turf for that kind of cred. But let’s see how the global rollout progresses in October.

The summer victor

With a few weeks before the next big-hitters, Interstellar (US release: 7 November) and The Hunger Games: Mockinjay – Part 1 (21 November), now’s the time to mull the 2014 blockbuster season. The fourth Transformers is the numerical winner worldwide. This year’s sole $1bn release, the film is perched on top of the worldwide chart and has a fair chance of being there come 31 December. But the first question marks, box office-wise, now hover over Michael Bay’s franchise: it has the lowest US gross of the four films ($245m – a 31% falloff from 2011’s Dark of the Moon), and consequently it’s the first time Transformers hasn’t increased its kitty.

Maleficent, which is at No 2 globally ($754.6m), has surely outperformed expectations; box-office conqueror in Brazil, Venezuela and Mexico, it is also No 2 in Russia and Japan. There’s no natural reason for a sequel (not that that usually stops Hollywood), so it’s the US champion Guardians of the Galaxy, standing 7th globally, that we must look to for future prospects. With a sturdy international showing to match its feat of being the only $300m US release of the year to date, its US/overseas split is almost 50/50. This is one measure of unusually early international acceptance, since new franchises normally perform more strongly in North America.

There’s been some debate about whether the 14.7% dropoff in US summer box office from last year represented another stage in long-term decline, or a period of retrenchment as the cycle of franchises begun in 2013 beds in. Both are valid viewpoints, but the US is the canary in the mine of the global mainstream. Yes, plenty of incipient franchises have consolidated, but virtually all had some form of pre-existing recognition factor, whether from toys, books, TV or older films. It’s a cause for concern that the one major attempt to launch a totally new property – Warner Brothers’ Edge of Tomorrow – bombed in the most receptive place.

The rest of the world

The only competition for Hollywood’s offerings this week was a quiet $6m Chinese opening (putting it 12th globally) for the wartime spy romance One Step Away, a first feature for the popular local-TV director Zhao Baogang. In Japan, samurai threequel Rurouni Kenshin: The Legend Ends (18th globally) added another $4m to brings its running gross to $21.2m, already close to half of what the previous instalment, released just six weeks ago, has scooped. Adapted from the Watsuki Nobuhiro comics (better known in the Anglophone world as Samurai X), the live-action series has garnered praise for keeping CGI to a minimum. Co-produced by Warner Brothers, it’s not pure-bred Japanese, but it’s definitely another sharp-looking offering that should make us all break out in big, teary manga eyes at the terrible state of Asian-film distribution in the west.

The future

Heaving into view next week is a 65-country release for Antoine Fuqua’s The Equalizer, in which Denzel Washington, taking the Edward Woodward role, tries his hand at launching a new franchise for Sony. The actor hits 60 this year and, putting a fatherly arm around Chloë Grace Moretz in the film, could he be looking to bust in on Liam Neeson’s family-values-avenger racket? The Boxtrolls, Universal’s scratty stop-motion animation, opens in the US – after an encouraging start to its run in the UK, where it’s just topped our chart for the second week running. And while the Hollywood majors continue to dither in China, the US-Australian outfit Arclight is releasing English-language, 12th-century period actioner Outcast there next week, teaming up Nicolas Cage and Hayden Christensen with local stars Yifei Lu and Andy On. On a $25m budget, things are on a surer footing than with costly Christian Bale bomb Flowers of War in 2011, the last serious China-focused joint venture.

Top 10 films, 19-21 September

1. The Maze Runner, $70.1m from 51 territories. $81.5m cumulative – 60.1% international; 39.9% US
2. (New) A Walk Among the Tombstones, $18.1m from 10 territories – 27.6% int; 72.4% US
3. Lucy, $13.7m from 36 territories. $377.8m cum – 67% int; 33% US
4. (New) This Is Where I Leave You, $11.8m from 1 territory – 100% US
5. Guardians of the Galaxy, $10.3m from 39 territories. $632m cum – 50.3% int; 49.7% US
6. Dolphin Tale 2, $10.2m from 13 territories. $30.1m cum – 10.2% int; 89.8% US
7. No Good Deed, $10.2m from 1 territory. $40.1m cum – 100% US
8. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, $9.95m from 50 territories. $333.3m cum – 44.4% int; 55.6% US
9. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, $8.4m from 17 territories. $683.7m cum – 69.7% int; 30.3% US
10. Sex Tape, $7.6m from 52 territories. $108.9m cum – 64.7% int; 35.3% US

• Thanks to Rentrak. All this week’s figures are based on estimates; all historical figures unadjusted, unless otherwise stated.

• How do you like our new global box-office column? What should we be covering in it? Let us know in the comments below