Boo! A Medea Halloween is the first Medea film in three years posted the biggest opening for a Medea film since Medea Goes to Jail in 2009. Though it received only a 29% positive rating from the critics surveyed by Rotten Tomatoes, Boo! earned an “A” CinemaScore from audiences that were reportedly only about 60% African-American, way down from the typical Medea film’s 80-90% figure. The film should do well next weekend, and with solid word-of-mouth a longer run remains a possibility.
Paramount’s Jack Reacher: Never Go Back is an attempt to create a genre film with a top star on a modest budget ($60 million). Based on a series of novels by Lee Child, Never Go Back opened better ($23 million) than the first Jack Reacher film in 2012 ($15 million). The question is, will it have the legs of the original film, which had an “A-“ CinemaScore? Never Go Back earned a “B+” CinemaScore, just a tad under its predecessor’s “A-“, but fared much worse with the critics (40% positive versus 62% for the 2012 film). The first Jack Reacher film earned $80 million here, but that was just 63% of its worldwide total, and Never Go Back will likely continue to do fairly well outside of North America, where it earned $31 million this weekend. Here in the States Never Go Back played to a predominantly older (82% over 25) male (57%) audience.
The Hasbro-based, low-budget horror film Ouija: The Origin of Evil, which cost just $9 million to produce, earned $14 million in its debut weekend. The Ouija prequel has the highest Rotten Tomatoes rating of any new film in wide release (81%), but the critics and horror film audiences don’t always see eye to eye—Ouija: The Origin of Evil earned a miserable “C” CinemaScore from opening weekend crowds that were evenly split between the genders and younger (with 57% under 25).
Last week’s winner, the Ben Affleck-starring action film The Accountant dropped just 43.2% in spite of direct competition from Jack Reacher: Never Go Back. Like Never Go Back, Gavin O’Connor’s The Accountant is a modestly-budgeted action film ($44 million). So far The Accountant has earned $47.9 million, and will likely finish its domestic run around $75 million, which means that it will have do well overseas to finish in the black.
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Weekend Box Office (Studio Estimates): October 21-23, 2016 |
||||||
|
Film |
Weekend Gross |
Screens |
Avg./Screen |
Total Gross |
Wk# |
|
|
1 |
Boo! A Madea Halloween |
$27,600,000 |
2,260 |
$12,212 |
$27,600,000 |
1 |
|
2 |
Jack Reacher: Never Go Back |
$23,000,000 |
3,780 |
$6,085 |
$23,000,000 |
1 |
|
3 |
Ouija: Origin of Evil |
$14,060,000 |
3,168 |
$4,438 |
$14,060,000 |
1 |
|
4 |
The Accountant |
$14,025,000 |
3,332 |
$4,209 |
$47,920,381 |
2 |
|
5 |
The Girl on the Train |
$7,270,000 |
3,091 |
$2,352 |
$58,902,330 |
3 |
|
6 |
Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children |
$6,000,000 |
3,133 |
$1,915 |
$74,431,835 |
4 |
|
7 |
Keeping Up with the Joneses |
$5,600,000 |
3,022 |
$1,853 |
$5,600,000 |
1 |
|
8 |
Kevin Hart: What Now? |
$4,110,000 |
2,567 |
$1,601 |
$18,941,645 |
2 |
|
9 |
Storks |
$4,085,000 |
2,145 |
$1,904 |
$64,714,528 |
5 |
|
10 |
Deepwater Horizon |
$3,625,000 |
2,828 |
$1,282 |
$55,270,671 |
4 |
Universal’s The Girl on the Train and Tim Burton’s Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children are both shedding screens, and though their percentage drops were small (40.6% and 33% respectively), so were their earnings totals ($7.2 million and $6 million). Both of these films are approaching profitability (Miss Peregrine’s has earned 68% of its total outside of North America), so the longer they can hang on in theaters, the better off they will be.
Fox’s ensemble comedy Keeping Up With the Joneses debuted in seventh place with just $5.6 million, even less than Relativity’s dud Masterminds, which bowed on September 30 and has earned just $17 million, which is likely the ceiling for The Joneses as well.
Kevin Hart’s comedy concert film, What Now? performed like a typical concert film, dropping a whopping 65.1% in its second frame and finishing at number 8. Warner Bros.’ animated feature Storks keeps chugging along, but is unlikely to earn enough to warrant a sequel, and the disaster film Deepwater Horizon still looks like a loser for Lionsgate, as it dropped to #10 with a domestic total that is just a bit above $55 million.
In limited release, Barry Jenkin’s Moonlight, which chronicles the life of gay African-American growing up in a Miami ghetto and has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 99% positive, did extremely well in a very limited release (4 theaters), averaging over $103,000 per venue. Don’t expect Moonlight to earn $150 million, but it could do very well at the Oscars.
Meanwhile the low-budget Mattel action figure-based superhero film Max Steel dropped 70% from its disastrous opening, averaging just $324 per theater from over 2,000 screens.
Be sure to check back here next weekend to see how Inferno, the third installment in the series that stars Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon that has already earned $98 million overseas, debuts along with an adaptation of Phillip Roth’s 1997 novel American Pastoral.
