No Need to Consult an Actual Ouija Board to Know the Movie Is #1
Audiences looking to be scared the final weekend going into Halloween week flocked to see Ouija, but from the sounds of things they may have come away feeling they got more of a trick than a treat.
According to Deadline, at one point Michael Bay was going to produce a $150 million Ouija movie to be directed by McG. I have no idea what that would have been like, but we can all thank Peter Berg’s Battleship getting sunk for sparing us a plethora of over-produced motion pictures based on toy and game properties owned by Hasbro. Sorry, Candyland.
Universal took the property to Blumhouse, which, let’s be honest, now makes 90% of all theatrically-released horror films, thus explaining why 90% of all theatrically-released horror films are exactly the same, probably also explaining why the horror genre has been in a slump for the past year… I’m sorry, what was my original point again?
Blumhouse made the movie out of Hasbro’s (sorta board game) Ouija for a mere $5 million, roughly the amount of money Michael Bay spends on fake tans for his leading ladies, and will come away with a tidy profit as the fright flick took in about $20 million and the #1 slot for the weekend.
The bad news, however, is that the film got terrible reviews, and even the easily scared early-tweener core audience Ouija was aimed at appear to have come away underwhelmed, bestowing it with a pretty lousy C Cinemascore. That doesn’t bode well for its future, but given this is the last week of Halloween season, it should play well for at least a few more days.
Meanwhile, the movie you should have seen this weekend opened in second with about $14 million. I’m talking about John Wickerman, in which right after Keanu Reeves’ daughter dies of cancer, feminist occultists assault him, kill his bees, and steal his honey, prompting him to don a bear suit and set out for fiery revenge with a flamethrower. For the record, I’ve had a wicked sinus infection this past week and am loaded on all sorts of cold medicine so I may have actually hallucinated that plot. Either way, John Wick was awesome. Go see it.
Holdover Dracula Untold dropped to 10th place with $4.3 million (just over $48 million total for three weeks) with Annabelle close behind in 11th, bringing in $3.3 million (approx. $79.5 million total after a month).
Next week sees Saw return to the big screen for its one-week-only 10th anniversary re-release. We can only assume that this is either an attempt to gauge how much popularity is left in the Saw franchise for a possible reboot or creativity in Hollywood is at such an all-time low now they’re even rebooting nostalgia too soon.
Aside from The Pyramid after Thanksgiving, what has been a pretty lame year of big screen horror movies comes to an end post-Halloween. Here’s hoping for a scarier 2015.
Categorized:News
