Weekend Box Office: 'Gone Girl' Officially Tops 'Annabelle' for #1

Weekend Box Office: ‘Gone Girl’ Officially Tops ‘Annabelle’ for #1

October 6, 2014

By Brad Brevet

By a margin of only $378,854, Gone Girl was the #1 film at the box office this past weekend, just barely topping the horror prequel Annabelle. Based on an average ticket price of $8.15 that’s a margin of only 46,485 tickets.

As I wrote yesterday, this is a great result for both films as the Gone Girl opening is the highest opening for a David Fincher film at $37.5 million. Meanwhile, the opening for Annabelle at $37.1 million is the highest for a horror film in 2014 and only $4 million shy of the opening for the film’s predecessor, The Conjuring, which will have its own direct sequel next October.

Heading into the weekend I would have guessed these two films would have been neck-and-neck around $27-28 million, but they sure proved me wrong. Of course, while Gone Girl is on top in terms of the amount of money taken in, when you count its $61 million budget versus the $6.5 million budget for Annabelle, which is now over $60 million worldwide after only 3 days, it’s hard not to consider the little horror film that could the weekend’s true winner.

The weekend’s other new wide release was the Nicolas Cage feature Left Behind, which could only muster $6.3 million from 1,825 theaters.

As for last weekend’s new releases, both The BoxTrolls and The Equalizer held on very well with The Equalizer coming in third, dropping only 45% for $18.7 million and a cume now up to $64.2 million. The BoxTrolls only dropped 30.7% for a second weekend of $11.9 million as their cume rose to $32 million as Laika and Focus announced a new three-film deal over the weekend.

When it comes to the Box Office Challenge, I’ve listed the current top ten from the points and accuracy leaderboards directly below and you can find the full leaderboard here. For the complete box office top ten and points awarded for this weekend specifically click here.