NEW YORK (NYTimes) - With Avengers: Endgame positioned to wipe out any competitors come Friday (April 26), only a couple of studios dared to roll out new movies over the weekend.

The Curse Of La Llorona, the latest horror movie from some of the producers of the popular Conjuring series, topped the domestic box office with US$26.5 million (S$36 million).

That is a solid start - the movie reportedly cost just US$9 million to make.

While it pales in comparison to the US$53.5 million that The Nun, a recent Conjuring offshoot, made during its opening weekend in September, it is above the US$21 million opening weekend that analysts expected.

Warner also took the No. 2 spot with its light-hearted superhero movie Shazam!, which brought in US$17.3 million during its third weekend.

Its domestic gross is now US$121.3 million.

The other new movie was Fox's faith-based Breakthrough, which landed in third place with US$11.1 million.

It is based on a 2015 incident in which a Missouri teenager survived after being submerged for 15 minutes in a frozen lake.