It’s essentially a tie for the top spot even though estimates have Nightcrawler edging out Ouija by $9,000. Both films effectively finished the Halloween weekend with $10.9 million with Open Road reporting a $10.909 million finish. I’ll ignore that for now as it doesn’t really matter and we’ll sort it out on Monday once actuals arrive. No matter what happens, this is going to be one of the worst showings for a #1 film at the box office this year, second only to early September when Guardians of the Galaxy won in its sixth weekend with $10.3 million.
There was some talk as if Nightcrawler might creep up to $13 million or so after bringing in $3.2 million on Friday, but I’m not surprised to see word of mouth couldn’t carry it much higher and that “B-” CinemaScore seems about right for this film, which isn’t exactly a match for general audiences. Ouija, however, was clearly appropriately timed because last weekend’s “C” CinemaScore suggested people were not liking what they saw, but audiences want something scary to see over the Halloween weekend and the PG-13 horror seemed to fit the bill as the re-release of Saw clearly wasn’t in the cards, which I’ll discuss in a second.
John Wick held on rather well in its second weekend, dropping only 44%, bringing in $8 million for a domestic cume now totaling $27.5 million.
In a bit of a surprise this weekend, not adding any theaters to its tally, the Bill Murray-led feature St. Vincent actually rose 0.001% from $7.74 million last weekend to $7.75 million this weekend, at least that’s the estimate so far. Will be interesting to see if it can maintain that figure once actuals come in. And, for those of you wondering, it only added 270 theaters from last weekend, so not a significant bump as word of mouth on this one has obviously spread, either that, or they read my review.
Getting back to the films we had on the board for predictions this weekend, we’ll start with newcomer Before I Go To Sleep, which opened in 1,902 theaters and could only muster $2 million and that “C+” CinemaScore suggests word of mouth won’t be helping its future prospects. Sorry Clarius Entertainment, looks like a third dog in a row.
Then we come to the 10th anniversary re-release of Saw, which was not exactly a celebrated anniversary as Lionsgate brought the film to 2,063 theaters and saw only $650,000 in returns for their efforts, or lack thereof. Yikes! If they had any thoughts of continuing this franchise I wonder if they were just dashed.
In better news, Birdman added anoher 181 theaters this weekend, now playing in 231, and brought in $2.5 million this weekend bringing its cume to $5 million in three weeks and still yet to even hit 250 theaters.
Next weekend sees the release of Christopher Nolan‘s Interstellar and Disney’s Big Hero 6 along with limited releases of Theory of Everything and Jessabelle. Could be an interesting weekend, especially with Interstellar coming to select IMAX theaters early and Big Hero 6 already earning some big buzz. Could the animated Disney feature knock out Nolan?
