September is not a particularly good month for movie box office receipts. That’s why this week’s opening of “The Equalizer” starring Denzel Washington must have been a pleasant surprise for Columbia and its parent Sony Corp. (NYSE: SNE). The film posted an unofficial total of $35 million in box office receipts, about 10% above the estimate from last week and the fourth best movie opening ever for the month.

This September may be something of an anomaly all the way around. Of September’s top 15 grossing movies, three have come this month: “The Equalizer”; “The Maze Runner” from Twenty-First Century Fox Inc. (NASDAQ: FOXA) just last week with $32.5 million; and “No Good Deed” also from Sony and its Screen Gems studio, which posted $24.25 million. The top September opening ever was Sony’s “Hotel Transylvania,” which opened with $42.5 million in 2012.

This is Denzel Washington’s 12th straight movie in which his starring role has led to an opening weekend take of at least $20 million, according to Box Office Mojo. Of those 12 movies, 10 were R-rated, an even more impressive statistic.

Last week’s box office leader, “The Maze Runner,” added $17.5 million this past weekend, for a 10-day total of $58 million for Fox.

The weekend’s other film with a wide release was “The Boxtrolls” from Comcast Corp.’s (NASDAQ: CMCSA) NBCUniversal and Focus Features. The stop-motion animated feature hauled in $17.25 million, higher than the $14 million estimate.

One of the surprise hits of the year so far is another NBCUniversal film, “Lucy,” starring Scarlett Johansson. The film’s opening weekend in the United States was good for about $44 million, and its current domestic box office total is about $125.5 million. Internationally, however, the film has more than doubled that total to $269.1 million, for a total of just less than $395 million since its late July release.

Based on domestic box office alone, “Lucy” ranks 17th for the year to date, and its worldwide rank is 12th. That’s not too bad when you consider that five of the year’s top 10 worldwide are based on comic-book characters, two are remakes (“Godzilla” and “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes”) and the others are animated (“How to Train Your Dragon 2” and “Rio 2”) or based on a successful animated movie (“Maleficent”). Even number 11 is an animated feature, “The LEGO Move.”

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