By Todd Allen

Don't worry. Most people didn't see this film.

Horror was crowned the champion at the Labor Day weekend box office, with The Possession taking the top spot with ~$17.7M.  This is the second Lion’s Gate film in a row to take the top spot, with the Expendables 2 (#3 this week) taking the top spot for the last two weeks.

First, let’s have a look at the top 10, as estimated at Box Office Mojo

1 The Possession $17,725,000
2 Lawless $9,674,000
3 The Expendables 2 $8,800,000
4 The Bourne Legacy $7,248,000
5 ParaNorman $6,551,000
6 The Odd Life of Timothy Green $6,055,000
7 The Dark Knight Rises $5,880,000
8 The Campaign $5,445,000
9 2016 Obama’s America $5,103,000
10 Hope Springs $4,700,000

The Dark Knight Rises held very steady with only an 18.6% drop.  Dark Knight Rises also cracked the $1B mark globally and has just passed the Dark Knight for #12 all-time globally.  Domestically, it’s sitting at #9 all-time, but a bit over $100M behind Dark Knight’s $533M.

In the geek chic category, Avengers got a pseudo-re-release (it wasn’t *quite* out of theaters yet) and pulled in roughly $1.7M to take #14 at the weekend box office.  Here’s the funny part, last weekend on 123 screens, Avengers averaged $938/screen.  This weekend on 1,582 screens, it averaged $994/screen.  Pretty consistent earnings, mostly a difference in available screens.

Amazing Spider-Man, still hanging around, picked up an extra 82 screens and somewhere in the neighborhood of $975K.  The per screen average of $1,946 indicates Spidey still has some life in him.  That’s a 98.2% bump from last week and the number of screens didn’t double, so that’s probably a good sign.

The big news this week was the utter futility of a film called “Oogieloves In The BIG Balloon Adventure.”  This looks to have been the worst wide-release film debut ever.  2,160 screens.  A pathetic $207/screen average.  2,160 screens and it might not even be in the top 25.  (From #15-25 can swap around a bit from estimates to actuals, but this is pathetic by pretty much any measurement.)

Next week looks to be another week light on big debuts.  The headliner will be the romantic drama “The Words” with 2,700 screens offering some stark contrast to The Possession.   Possibly of more interest to Beat readers will be The Cold Light of Day, an action thriller with Bruce Willis, Sigourney Weaver and Henry Cavill.  That’s only 1,500 screens, though, so it will need to really pack ’em in to climb the chart.

3 COMMENTS

  1. I think they missed out on a much bigger BO bump for Avengers by not putting some Iron Man 3 footage before/after the movie.

  2. Yeah, that’s a horrible opening for Oogieloves.

    I didn’t know about the characters until I saw the movie posters, and seeing them, wanted to know even less. (But I must… one sec… HOOhahahah!)

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oogieloves_in_the_Big_Balloon_Adventure

    Read the plot summary in a sing-song pre-Looney Tunes voice!

    Wow. An original motion picture. No other media tie-in.

    The company is also rather suspect:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romar_Entertainment

    Geez… Their website is nothing but a title page! That’s pretty shocking by Hollywood standards!
    Oh wait… that’s the old company.
    Here’s the new one:
    http://www.romar41.com/

    But it’s probably distributed digitally to theaters, saving printing costs. Shoot it on digital movie cameras, and the costs are probably low (although the budget is $20 Million, and there is a six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon quality cast).

    Wow… it’s like they’re the children of the Garbage Pail Kids (although that movie had a better opening).

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