Box Office 11/9/09: Christmas Starts Slow
Halloween has come and gone, the holiday lights are appearing in the retail capitals of the world and Robert Zemeckis has another fantastically expensive motion capture animation, designed to entertain us with the volume turned up to 11. $30.05M is on the low side for this kind of thing but, given that A Christmas Carol was released a full seven weeks before the Big Day, it has at least a fighting chance of reaching its $200M budget.
Historically, where Christmas movies are concerned, only the Tim Allen Santa Clause movies open this early, and Carol just bested 2002's The Santa Clause 2, which opened on November 6th (but cost a relatively modest $65M) and was beaten out by How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000) which opened on 11/17 with $55M, Elf (2003), which opened 11/7 with $31.11M, and (depressingly) Four Christmases (2008), which opened 11/26/08 with $31.06M.
At #2, Michael Jackson's This Is It is down 43% with $13.15M while The Men Who Stare at Goats opened with $12.70 at #3. The Fourth Kind is at #4 with $12.23, desperately hoping to soak up some of that Paranormal Activity money (budget undisclosed, but Milla Jovovich's trailer was doubtless more than PA's entire cost). At #5 Paranormal Activity itself comes close to crossing the $100M mark with $8.27M, for a running total of $97.10M - 'nuff said, I'm out of superlatives (see my review here).
Richard Kelly's The Box is at #6 with a disappointing – given its 2,635 theater release – $7.57M (though the budget was a lean $25M). Couples Retreat and Law Abiding Citizen hold on at positions seven and eight, and at #9, in spite of its detractors, Where the Wild Things Are is doing okay with $4.17M for a four week total of $69.70M, more than can be said for Astro Boy, which has failed to find a significant audience, bringing in $2.62M for a three week total of just $15.11M.
Saw VI sunk 61%, with $2.03M and a three week total of $26.25M, placing it easily in profit against its $11M budget, albeit as the least successful of the Saw series. Oscar hopeful Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire, did remarkably well at #12, bringing in $1.87M in just 18 theaters.
Next weekend sees the launch of marketing juggernaut 2012, Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr Fox (review here) on limited release, and also Richard Curtis's thankfully renamed The Boat That Rocked, which will be know in the US as Pirate Radio.
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.
