The crowd pleasing sequel to Ben Affleck’s autistic assassin thriller “The Accountant” didn’t have much of a chance against Ryan Coogler’s “Get Out” sized horror phenomenon, “Sinners.”

“Sinners” is having a near-historic “hold” on its second weekend. After opening with an eye-popping $48 million, a period piece horror thriller about race, racism and how a juke joint’s business model doesn’t take into account the impact of vampires, Deadline.com notes that it stands to clear $40 million this weekend — $45. That’s less than a 7% drop from i’s opening weekend.

Wow.

Sure, I found the whole vampire thing deeply disappointing, kind of a stretch as racism metaphors go, taking the narrative into a scorched-earth bloodbath finale. Truth be told, “The Accountant 2” takes on a kind of cleansing “Kill them all” approach to wrapping things up as well. Hell, even the Netflix thriller “Havoc” cleans house with mass killing just before the closing credits.

That appears to be what audiences want in their R-rated thrillers — a sense that justice will be done and evil will be wiped out by emptying a few clips into it.

“The Accountant 2” is a vengeance thriller/buddy picture with “Sound of Freedom” human traffickers as its targets, and that adds up to a very healthy $24+ million opening weekend. It’s Ben Affleck’s most entertaining turn in years, reprising his on-the-spectrum numbers guy/gun-for-hire character from a sleeper hit of a few years back. He adds a nerdy accent to the character, and becomes both a punch line and straight man for Jon Bernthal’s swaggering, you-know-what swinging performance as the not-autistic/just-awkward assassin-brother in this funny, glib shoot-em-up/shoot-em-all-up.

There’s nothing ambitious about it, unless you think the timing of a movie about perfectly functional adults (Affleck) and kids (a special school whose members are the cleverest young hackers on the planet) arrived just in time to make Robert F. Kennedy Jr. look like an even bigger crackpot.

Bernthal reminds me of the gruff, tough and funny character actor Fred Ward (“The Right Stuff,” “Miami Blues”), with matinee idol potential. Every hit — streaming or big screen — gives him a shot at attaining that status.

Studios and theater owners alike, scrambling to find content to fill seats in this shrunken and shrinking post-pandemic cinema scene, have rediscovered the found-money in re-issuing popular pictures of the past, crowd-friendly classics.

“Star Wars: Reveng of the Sith” is the latest re-issue to hit theaters, and it’s doing boffo numbers for a 20 year old title. $25 million? You’d think “Star Wars” would be so over-exposed, with Disney milking that intellectual property for all its worth with streaming series, that a movie all the fans have seen, probably more than once, wouldn’t move the needle.

But blockbusters like “A Minecraft Movie” ($22 million this weekend) remind us that seeing a movie in a theater is still a magical experience for true believers. Gathering for a communal celebration with the faithful is something society and subcultures within it crave, especially now. Even if the sacred rites are ritualized in the form of a lesser title in the long light sabre canon.

If devotees of a video game gather to cry with joy over a “Chicken Jockey” trotting out on a big screen, why not the “Star Wars” celebrators?

The horror thriller “Until Dawn” is the only other wide release bowing this weekend. It too is based on a video game (Sony’s Playstation title). It’s humorless and video-game formulaic and yet managed $8 million. Found money, little as it is, as Sony Screen Gems released it, and Peter Stormare is the biggest name actor they hired for it. But right about now, execs there are kicking themselves for not shoving a “chicken jockey” into the game.

Horror titles have been miss or miss and miss and occasionally hit all this year.

The animated Easter release “King of Kings” did another $4 million, finishing sixth.