Box Office 11/16/09: End of the World Wins Big
To nobody's surprise, Roland Emmerich's $200M 2012 ruled the weekend box office. The disaster-meister's latest dollop of CGI destructo-porn raked in $65.2M, a little behind his biggest opener, the global cooling thriller The Day After Tomorrow ($68.7M in 2004), and also trailing last year's opening of Quantum of Solace on the same weekend ($67.5M).
A Christmas Carol held on well at #2, with only a 26% drop from its slightly disappointing opening, with $22.3M for a 10-day total of $63.27M. This year's other "little film that could" Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire pulled in a remarkable $5.87M on 174 screens ($33,762 per screen, which is good but not good enough to take the average-per-screen pole position) to take the #3 spot, while Men Who Stare at Goats battled poor reviews with another $5.86M, for a running total of $23.03M.
Michael Jackson's This Is It enters week three of its strictly limited two week run (do distributors have no shame?) with a 61% drop (perhaps audiences thought it was no longer playing) for $5.07M and a total of $67.19M. Widely derided, The Fourth Kind plummeted 62% to #6 with $4.60M, bringing its 10-day total to $20.44M (budget undisclosed). Both Couples Retreat (which cost an inexplicable $70M) and Paranormal Activity ($11–15,000 depending on who you believe) both crossed the $100M barrier this week, each pulling in around $4M for the weekend.
Law Abiding Citizen slipped one place to #9, with $3.79M and The Box (reportedly the recipient of some of the worst exit poll reviews in some time) just managed to stay inside the top 10 with $3.15M for a 10-day total of $13.17M. Richard Curtis's Pirate Radio managed a weak $2.90M in 882 theaters at #11, while Where the Wild Things Are is proving tenacious at #12, with $2.41M, making its total $73.44M in just over four weeks.
Fantastic Mr Fox (read my review here) opened small in just four theaters, but was by far the biggest winner on a per-screen basis, pulling in an average of $66,475, over twice the total of Precious. Expect this to do well with hipster parents over Thanksgiving.
This coming weekend sees the opening of tween juggernaut The Twilight Saga: New Moon; Spanish/English/US Pixar-wannabe Planet 51, a limited release (finally) for John Woo's Red Cliff (edited down to one 148-minute film from the original two-part epic); and Werner Herzog's ecstatically received festival favorite Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, with a back-on-form Nicolas Cage.
Box Office 11/2/09: Michael Jackson vs. Horror
Unsurprisingly (and some would say appropriately), Michael Jackson's This Is It took the Halloween weekend #1 position, against few new openings and several genre holdovers.
Paranormal Activity continued its outstanding run, dropping just 21.6% from last week's #1 position and adding another $16.38M to its running tally of $84.62M, which now makes it the eighth most successful supernatural horror film ever made, ahead of Poltergeist (1982), and just behind The Amityville Horror (1979).
Where the Wild Things Are kicked up less of a rumpus, dropping 58% to #5, with $5.93M, for $62.65M after three weeks and Saw VI plummeted 62.7% to the #6 spot, with a weekend take of $5.27M and a two week total of $22.53M, safely putting it in profit (against an $11M budget), if not exactly setting the box-office on fire. Meanwhile, Astro Boy limped on with $3.46M in the #7 spot, a $11.31M two-week total meaning that its Hong Kong investors are unlikely to see a return on their $65M investment, however The Stepfather remake did slightly better, down 45% with $3.40M, for $24.74M.
Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant, took $2.80M at #9, down 51% on the same number of screens for a dismal two week total of $10.80M on a $40M budget. Last week's Amelia expanded by 250 theaters, but dropped 23% for $3M, at #10 and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and Zombieland, both held on with $2.74M and $2.62M respectively.
At #14, Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day opened on 68 screens, bringing in $546,687, and at #16 Halloween II expanded wider for the holiday, adding 992 sites, bringing in an additional $445,344. Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas in 3-D brought in another $140,037 for a re-release total of $356,022 at #27, and at #50 Antichrist added eight screens and brought in $49,292 for a total of $156,318.
Of the remaining new releases, Ti West's The House of the Devil opened on three screens at #58, bringing in $8,398 per screen (second highest of the week), for a total of $25,195, and at #76 Jared Hess's Gentleman Broncos opened on two screens, with $5,751 each, for a total of $11,502.
Next week, Robert Zemeckis's A Christmas Carol opens, along with alien abduction drama The Fourth Kind, and Richard Kelly's The Box.
Box Office: Paranormal Prime, Saw Second
Regular readers of this column will know that we're very happy with today's weekend box-office estimates, with Paranormal Activity hitting the #1 spot for the first time, taking $21.10M for a five week total of $61.58M. Remarkable.
Saw VI, generally regarded as an improvement over previous sequels, came in second with a disappointing $14.11M, the worst of the franchise. However, as usual, this needs to be viewed in light of its budget, a slim $11M and the fact that a Saturday Halloween will give this legs through next weekend. Where the Wild Things Are dropped a precipitous 57%, with $14.01M, for a two week total of $53.55M, seemingly bearing out critic's concerns about its appeal to the younger audience – it will be interesting to see how the similarly reviewed Fantastic Mr Fox fares when it is released on 25th November (look for a review here in the next day or so).
Law Abiding Citizen and Couples Retreat maintained, down 41% and 38% respectively, but at #6, Astro Boy proved to have limited appeal with only $6.70M on a $65M budget. The week's biggest disappointment is Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant, which could only scare up $6.29M at #7, giving it a long way to go to make profit on its $40 investment. The Stepfather, held on reasonably well, down 46% to $6.23M for a two week total that roughly equals its $20M budget.
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is proving that weird wins with the wee ones, holding the #9 position, a $5.25M take bringing its six week total to $114.85M. Zombieland is also proving resilient, down 724 sites and 45%, with $4.20M for a four week total of $67.21M from a $23.6M budget. The only other major release this week, aviatrix biopic Amelia, tanked at #11 with $3.90M, around 10% of its budget.
Meanwhile, further down the chart, Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas in 3-D reissue pulled in $143,289 at 105 sites for the #35 slot, a disappointment given the investment taken to convert the 2-D original. Also taking a bow this week is Lars von Trier's controversial Antichrist at #42, chaos reigning on just six screens with a $71,397 take – an $11,900 per-screen average being the best of the week. Tony Jaa's Ong Bak 2: The Beginning also debuted, at #62 with $26,564 from 10 sites.
Next week's genre openings are festival favorites House of the Devil and Gentleman Broncos, as well as, erm, Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day, all up against Michael Jackson concert rehearsal This Is It.
Box Office: Wild Things Still Hot, Paranormal Soars
A weekend that usually sees pre-Halloween openings for horror and supernatural movies (Max Payne in '08, 30 Days of Night in '07, The Prestige in '06) saw the box office up 39% year-on-year, thanks to strong business for new and widening releases.
Despite some baffled reviews that intimated it might struggle to find an audience, Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are hit the #1 spot with $32.47M this weekend, on 5,000 screens (budget is around $100M). Box Office Mojo reports Warner Brothers' stats that the audience was 43% 18 years plus, 12% 12-17 year olds, 27% parents with kids under 12, and 16% under 12s.
The #2 spot was taken by the Gerard Butler/Jaimie Foxx thriller Law Abiding Citizen, with $21.25M (on a budget of $50M), which is less that the $27.60M taken by The Ugly Truth, and just under the $21.78M pulled in by Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (2003), making it Butler's fourth highest opening (300 took $70.88M in its first weekend and is proving a hard act to follow).
The big story continues to be Paranormal Activity which, as promised, opened wide this weekend, though still on a modest 1,250 screens at 760 sites, pulling in $20.16M, for a four week total of $33.71. The fact that the per-screen averages at $26,530 is over three times that of Wild Things, means this one should hold strong through Halloween, and easily top $50M (a nice return on that reported $15,000 investment).
Couples Retreat retreated to #4, leaving this week's only other genre release The Stepfather to limp into fifth place with $12.30M, its $20M budget means an inevitable profit, but hopefully this less than stellar opening from the team behind Prom Night means they will rethink their strategy of remaking R-rated 80s horrors in PG-13 versions.
Zombieland officially became the most successful zombie movie of all time, with $7.8M, for a 17 day total of $60.82M, ahead of Dawn of the Dead (2004), Pet Cemetery (1989), Resident Evils Apocalypse (2004) and Extinction (2007), 28 Weeks Later (2007), Creepshow (1982), and Land of the Dead (2005).
Friday sees the release of Astro Boy, Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant, The Nightmare Before Christmas 3-D reissue, Ong Bak 2, and the inevitable Saw VI.
UPDATE: Actual figures show that Wild Things was underestimated (actual figure is $32.69M) and Paranormal Activity overestimated (actual: $19.67M), as were The Stepfather ($11.58M), and Zombieland ($7.61M).
Box Office: Zombies Hold On, Big Activity
The Vince Vaughn comedy Couples Retreat may have taken top honors at the weekend box office, but the real stories are a sturdy zomcom hold over and a certain little fright movie's record breaking success.
In the #2 spot, Zombieland is showing good legs with $15M, down just 39.4% from last weeks's opening, giving it a two week total of $47.80M against its $23.6M budget, unsurprisingly there is talk of a sequel.
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, is also holding on well, with $12M in its fourth week, meaning it should cross the $100M mark sometime in the next few days, which will be a relief to Sony, as that's exactly what it cost to produce. In other animated news Toy Story/Toy Story 2 (3D) took an expected 38.6% tumble to the #4 spot with $7.67M ($22.67 total).
The week's big news however is that Paranormal Activity pulled in an impressive $7.06M on just 160 screens, breaking Platoon's weekend record for the most money earned on less than 200 sites ($3.7M on 174 screens, which to be fair would work out to about $7M when adjusted for inflation). With a $44,163 per screen average being far and way the highest of the week, it looks like Paramount's slow-roll strategy has paid off as the movie goes into wide release next weekend. Its total so far is $8.28M, is its safe to say that someone in Paramount's marketing department will be getting more that a subscription to the Jelly of the Month club this holiday season.
Surrogates is holding on perhaps a little better than expected with $4.11M for a total of $32.57M after three weeks, but Ricky Gervais' The Invention of Lying drops 52% with $3.37M in week two on poor word of mouth. Little else of note this week, but we look forward to Paranormal going wide next weekend against The Stepfather remake and Black Dynamite, along with the long-anticipated release of Spike Jonze and David Eggers' Where the Wild Things Are.
UPDATE: Final figures proved an underestimate in the total for Paranormal Activity, putting the film in the #4 spot, ahead of the Toy Story double bill, with $7.90M.
Paranormal Activity Hits One Million, Goes Wide
At 10.34pm PST on Friday October 9th, Paranormal Activities' marketing plan finally paid off, with the one millionth demand on the Eventful-driven website www.paranormalmovie.com.
Whether or not you feel that the campaign—driven as it is by a major studio—is a little disingenuous, the fact is that an effectively scary movie, shot for $15,000 in the director's home will now get the audience it truly deserves. Oren Peli deserves our congratulations.
Box Office: Zombies Nut Up, Paranormal Sighted
Zombieland triumphed at the box office this weekend (review here), with a weekend gross of $25M, higher than both expectations, and its budget of $23.5M. Director Ruben Fleischer was at pains to avoid comparisons with Shaun of the Dead, so he'll be happy to know that his weekend take is almost double that of Shaun's entire US run ($13.54M, worldwide gross $30.03M), though the UK production was made for the equivalent of a paltry $4M. Zak Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake keeps its title of "Highest Opening Weekend for a Zombie Movie. Ever.", with $26.72M.
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs held on well in its third week, with $16.70M, down 33% for a total of $82.39M, and the Toy Story/Toy Story 2 3D double bill paid dividends for Pixar with $12.50M in 1,745 theaters. Ricky Gervais comes in a creditable fourth with The Invention of Lying ($7.34M), despite a trailer that completely avoids mentioning the main theme of the film for fear of offending religious folk, and advertising which amusingly knocks 10 years and 20 pounds off his usual, delightfully lived-in, visage.
Surrogates failed to revive in fifth place, with a 50% drop at $7.34M, its two week total of $26.38M, a long way from the $80M budget - it would be good to see Jonathon Mostow buck this disappointing run of big budget fare (U-571, Terminator 3), and return to the form of his excellent Duel simulacrum, Breakdown (1997)
Michael Moore's new (last?) documentary Capitalism: A Love Story did well (but not Fahrenheit 9/11 well) with $4.85M, while Fame, at #8, The Informant!, Love Happens, and Tyler Perry' I Can Do Bad All By Myself all continued to decline, as did Pandorum, which received better reviews that Surrogates, but fell 56.5% to #12, with $1.92, for a two week total of $7.81M, well shy of its $40M budget.
Paranormal Activity (review here) appears at #19, with a weekend income of $535,000 in 33 cinemas, an average per-cinema take of $16,212, twice that of Zombieland, and only beaten out by the $42,000 average taken by the Coen brothers new film A Serious Man in just six screens (total $252,000).
Box Office: Continuing Cloudy, Surrogates stalls
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs held on to the #1 spot this weekend, beating out new science fiction genre releases, but the one number we're really interested in is a no-show.
Cloudy dropped just 19% to take $24.60M for a two week total of $60.03M, against a budget of $100M. The poorly reviewed Surrogates, directed by Jonathon Mostow (Breakdown, Terminator 3), written by the team of Michael Ferris, and John D Brancato (Terminator 3, Terminator: Salvation), from Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele's graphic novel, and starring Bruce Willis, pulled in a disappointing (for an $80M movie) $15M to take second place, ahead of the Fame remake.
The Informant! also held well (down 34% with $6.91M, for a total of $20.99M, on a $22M budget), while Tyler Perry's I Can Do Bad All By Myself dropped another 52% to the #5 spot with $4.75M, leaving Pandorum as this week's real disappointment at #6, with $4.40M. Helmed by Christian Alvert, who previously directed the weighty serial killer drama Antobodies/Antijkörper (2005), the film suffers from a ho-hum plot (script by Travis Molloy), and one of the worst tag lines of all time, but has some effective moments and would work well in a direct-to-DVD, low expectation environment, but fails to live up to its $40M budget and the presence of Dennis Quaid and the always interesting Ben Foster (30 Day of Night, 3:10 to Yuma).
At #8, Jennifer's Body failed to revive in week two, dropping 49%, with $3.6M for a running total of $12.30M, still short of its $16M budget. 9 was also down $49% in week three, taking $2.83M, for a total of $27.10M, while Tarantino's Basterds now stands at $114.46M after six weeks, having taken another $2.72M.
The Final Destination ($1.38M/$64.60M), Sorority Row ($1.11M/$10.74M), District 9 ($1.089M/$113.52M), GI Joe: Rise of the Cobra ($682,000/$147.40M), Gamer ($520,000/$20.11M), The Time Traveler's Wife ($495,000/$61.68M), and Whiteout ($430,000/$9.83) all continued their downward trend, but the surprise was the no-show of Paranormal Activity, which according to Variety pulled in $80,000 from 24 late-night showings in 12 cities. This should have placed it around #24, ahead of Star Trek's $65,000 ($257.70M in its 21st week), but the film failed to show, presumably because these were single screening and don't count as a full release. Expect it to go wider next week and start pulling in real numbers – Paramount should bear in mind that the audience they're aiming to attract through Twitter and Facebook can smell a lack of authenticity from a mile off, and just release this before the backlash kicks in.
UPDATE: At 6:28pm an email was sent from the Paranormal Activity Website stating that, thanks to the sold-out weekend screenings, Paramount has agreed to expand the movie to 20 new cities, including Chicago, LA, Miami, New York, and San Francisco. Deatails on venue and showtimes will be released tomorrow.
Full list of cities is as follows: Atlanta, GA; Chicago, IL, Dallas, TX; Washington DC/Baltimore, MD; Denver, CO; Detroit, MI; Houston, TX; Los Angeles, CA; Las Vegas, NV; Miami, FL; Minneapolis, MN; New York, NY; Philadelphia, PA; Phoenix, AZ; Sacramento, CA; San Antonio, TX; San Diego, CA; San Francisco, CA; San Jose, CA; Tampa, FL.
Paranormal Activity (2009)
Country: USA
Length: 96 mins
Production Company: Blumhouse Productions
Executive Producer: Steven Schneider
Producers: Jason Blum, Oren Peli
Director/Writer/Cinematographer/Editor: Oren Peli
Special Makeup Effects: Crystal Cartwright
Sound Designer: Mark Binder
Budget: $15,000
Cast: Katie Featherston (Katie), Micah Sloat (Micah), Michael Baymouth (The Psychic), Amber Armstrong (Katie's Girlfriend).
Originally made in 2007, and picked up by Dreamworks at Slamdance in 2008 (apparently it scared Spielberg senseless), Oren Peli's $15,000 movie has been hyped by Paramount as the next Blair Witch Project, and marketed through Twitter (@tweetyourscream), Facebook, and at free midnight shows in college towns and film festivals. Initially targeted for a larger budget remake, test screenings aimed at identifying what should be changed, instead persuaded the suits to release the original, albeit with some re-editing.
The challenge - beyond our now in-built resistance to internet hype - is whether another micro-budget, video-perspective shocker has enough creativity, intelligence, and jump-out-your-seat scares to become a genuine phenomenon. Thankfully the answer in this case is a resounding "Hell, yeah".
Director/writer/cinematographer/editor Oren Peli's genius is to take the "throw the camera at the action" genre norm (seen in everything from Blair Witch to [Rec] and Cloverfield), and turn it on its head. For the most part – certainly for the most effective part – the camera becomes a static observer, from the corner of a bedroom at night, leaving the audience to search the frame for the slightest movement, and building a tangible sense of dread normally felt only in the second before you wake from a truly awful nightmare.
The patience required in the first third of the film is amply rewarded, as initial rumblings and strange noises gradually segue over several nights into strange activity and stranger, possibly dangerous, behavior. The film is not perfect, but Peli and his fine cast ratchet the tension to an almost unbearable degree, playing on the primal terror of sound, shadow, and the half-seen exploited by Val Lewton in the 40s, and exemplified in Lewton alumnus, Robert Wise's The Haunting (1963). One of the most chilling moments in horror history is Julie Harris's wide-eyed delivery of the line "God! God! Whose hand was I holding?" in Wise's masterpiece, and there are scenes that easily rival that here.
In a season when the biggest hit is a 3D sequel, studios think low budget horror films require hot chicks to sell tickets, and the grown-up material goes straight to DVD, it's a shot in the arm to experience an audience of 800+ (as I did last night in San Francisco's Castro Theater) experience a bite-your-knuckles, grab-your-partner, roller-coaster ride, and love every thrilling minute of it – it's been years since I heard so much spontaneous screaming and applause in a movie theater. Avoid the hype and see this with a close friend, on a big screen, as soon as possible. See the Website for theater listings, or to demand a showing in your area (US only).
