Anderson also reports that Sandra Bullock’s politically charged film Our Brand Is Crisis turned out to be another tremendous disappointment as the film fell out of the top five entirely earning only $3.4 million for its opening salvo, about half of what Jeff Goldstein, Executive Vice President at Warner Brothers expected. Those films are on track to end the weekend at $7.4 million and $5.4 million respectively. And with total domestic box office sales up nearly 5% from where they were this same time previous year, there’s no doubt that ticket sales are alive and well despite the fact that ticket prices are still on the rise.
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The other pseudo-horror film in theaters is the comedy zombie flick Scouts Guide To The Zombie Apocalypse, which hedged its bets on crude and vulgar R-rated comedy rather than any sort of advertising or promotional budget.
Coming in second this weekend was Sony’s Goosebumps, adding an estimated $10.2 million to its cume as the film has done well in its first three weekends. Goosebumps earned an additional $10.2 million this weekend, off a good-for-Halloween 34% compared to last weekend.
Sony Pictures Classics “Truth”, which recounts CBS’ reporting on President George W. Bush’s military service, expanded to 1,120 theaters, but couldn’t even crack $1 million.
Fox’s resilient space drama lost another 268 locations on Friday but still managed to remain firmly in first place on Friday with an estimated $3.5 million. For the rest of the box office, you can go here.
Friday’s final new release was Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse. Paramount is experimenting with a shortened theatrical window for the film, along with the recently opened “Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension”. Certainly the studio didn’t plan on several exhibitors refusing to show either film, which really affects the overall results. I don’t think this can be looked at as a failure from this perspective as I would think a second, and possibly earlier, attempt next year may be a smart move.
In expansion, A24’s Room brought in $269,500 from 49 theaters. “Halloween has never been a big weekend for Hollywood, but you’ve got this overcrowded marketplace of films good and bad”.
“The Martian” was on top for four of the last five weekends, and remained there today, with a paltry $11.4 million in sales, said movie analyst Paul Dergarabedian at Rentrak. Spectre took the highest seven day gross record in United Kingdom box office history from the last James Bond film, Skyfall.
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Next week it will be all be about Bond as Spectre blasts into theaters; it got off to an impressive $80.4 million start overseas this weekend.
