Genre movie fans might be a little happier about the fact that a horror film led the box office for the second week in a row if this past weekend hadn't been one of the worst in years, the lowest since that fateful September weekend in 2008 when Nicholas Cage temporarily topped the charts in the forgettable Bangkok Dangerous. The 20% year-over-year drop in the total of the Top 12 films this weekend is not a good sign for Hollywood, which has yet to see a full recovery from the psychological effects of the Aurora, Colorado shootings, which played a role in the 6% box office revenue decline in July and an even steeper 14% drop in August, setbacks that threaten to derail 2012's status as "Hollywood’s box office comeback year."
The anemic box office shouldn’t take away from The Possession's successful run. The exorcism-themed chiller dropped just 46% in its sophomore session as it earned an estimated $9.5 million. So far the $14 million horror film has earned $33.3 million and it could end up in with as much as $50 million in domestic box office earnings.
| Weekend Box Office (Studio Estimates): September 7 - 9, 2012 | ||||||
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| Film | Weekend Gross | Screens | Avg./ Screen | Total Gross | Wk# |
| 1 | The Possession | $9,500,000 | 2,834 | $3,352 | $33,349,000 | 2 |
| 2 | Lawless | $6,002,000 | 3,138 | $1,913 | $23,520,000 | 2 |
| 3 | The Words | $5,000,000 | 2,801 | $1,785 | $5,000,000 | 1 |
| 4 | The Expendables 2 | $4,750,000 | 3,260 | $1,457 | $75,417,000 | 4 |
| 5 | The Bourne Legacy | $4,000,000 | 2,766 | $1,446 | $103,700,000 | 5 |
| 6 | ParaNorman | $3,830,000 | 2,856 | $1,341 | $45,098,000 | 4 |
| 7 | The Odd Life of Timothy Green | $3,650,000 | 2,717 | $1,343 | $43,007,000 | 4 |
| 8 | The Campaign | $3,530,000 | 2,542 | $1,389 | $79,473,000 | 5 |
| 9 | The Dark Knight Rises | $3,285,000 | 1,987 | $1,653 | $437,849,000 | 8 |
| 10 | 2016 Obama's America | $3,281,000 | 2,017 | $1,627 | $26,088,000 | 9 |
Last week's number 2 film, the Weinstein Company's blood-soaked period drama Lawless, dropped just 40% and finished second again with an estimated total of $6 million. In fact no film in the Top 10 dropped more that 47%, which is more of a testament to how bad last weekend was than to their great staying power.
The only new film in the Top Ten was the Bradley Cooper-starring, generically titled The Words, which earned a paltry $5 million in spite of a wide release in more than 2,800 theaters. Females (58%) dominated the audience for the movie starring People Magazine's "Sexiest Man Alive," and it was an older crowd with 78% of the debut audience over 25. The Words' mediocre "B" CinemaScore doesn’t really indicate much about its future performance.
The Dark Knight Rises remained in the Top 10 for the eighth week as it earned $3.3 million and brought its domestic total to $437.8 million. Although TDKR doesn't have a chance to match 2008’s The Dark Knight’s domestic total of $533.3 million, Christopher Nolan's final Batman film has already earned nearly $40 million more than its predecessor worldwide. While The Dark Knight earned 46.8% of its total overseas, The Dark Knight Rises’ foreign earnings now represent 58% of its total.
Steven Spielberg's 1981 Indiana Jones saga Raiders of the Lost Ark got an IMAX run in 267 venues to celebrate the film's upcoming Blu-ray release and the classic adventure film averaged a solid, but hardly spectacular, $6,461 per venue.
Check back next week to see if Resident Evil: Retribution, Finding Nemo 3-D, or Bangkok Revenge can manage to shake to box office out of the doldrums.