Girl on the Train derails Bridget Jones's Baby at UK and Ireland box office

Emily Blunt stars opposite fellow Brit Luke Evans in The Girl on the Train

The Girl on the Train has ended Bridget Jones's cinematic dominance by topping the UK and Ireland box office chart on its first weekend of release.

The film of Paula Hawkins' novel sees Emily Blunt play an alcoholic trying to solve a mystery.

It made £6.95m in its first five days in cinemas, sending Bridget Jones's Baby down to two after three weeks in the top spot.

Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children has also moved down a place.

It took £2.22m at the box office, falling from number two to three.

The Girl on the Train was also the number one film in the US and Canada at the weekend, having taken $24.7m (£19.9m).

Deepwater Horizon and The Magnificent Seven round out this week's top five with weekend takings of £987,694 and £511,539 respectively.

War on Everyone, the latest film from Anglo-Irish writer-director John Michael McDonagh, fared less well than The Girl on the Train on its first weekend, entering the chart at seven.

Yet its £187,564 haul still trumped that of Mel Gibson's latest action thriller Blood Father, whose £69,000 takings saw it ranked a lowly 17th in this week's countdown.

Bridget Jones's Baby was released in the UK and Ireland on 16 September

After just four weeks on release, Bridget Jones's Baby - the third film to star Renee Zellweger as Helen Fielding's "singleton" heroine - is now the fourth highest-grossing UK release of 2016.

It is almost level with comic book movie Deadpool and could overtake both Finding Dory's £42m and the £46.2m that The Jungle Book took earlier this year.

There were 18.1 million cinema admissions across the UK in August, the highest monthly total of 2016 so far.

Final placings, though, are sure to be heavily influenced by Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them, in cinemas in November, and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, out in December.