Not a whole lot of people are going to the theaters this weekend, and Hollywood aims to be in prime position to blame the rare late-season hurricane coming up the East Coast. To be quite frank, this is completely bogus and at most it looks like a 10-15% shed off revenue although we will play ball for now and assume their already weak box office can be squarely shouldered on the back of a bitch named Sandy.
The winner for the three-day looks to be Argo early on as it certainly took the Friday crown with $4.0 million which gives away the bigger story in all this: Silent Hill and Cloud Atlas performed so terribly that a serious drama in its third week managed to score the top spot. The former found a lackluster $3.5 million Friday–less than half of what the franchise debuted to six years ago when it had a bigger budget ($50 million versus $20 million.)
As far as Cloud Atlas is concerned, it would appear that everyone in Hollywood who passed on the project as completely unsellable was…absolutely 100% right. This movie stunk with a dreary $3.5 million opening day. Cloud Atlas cost foreign investors $100 million to make which will almost assuredly never be fully recouped. The loser in this one might be audiences though as big risks like this are certain to be in the dog house for quite some time.
In terms of Paranormal Activity 4′s second weekend, $3.1 million starts things off. What more is there to say other than the film declined 79% week-to-week despite an advance weekend of Halloween. This is just awful stuff that no one can blame on the weather as we see the Ethan Hawke-led Sinister still at $1.8 million showing strength in the genre still persists.
Another week two offering in the form of Alex Cross is at $1.7 million, down 60%. This movie received awful reviews, but Summit likes the character so it is entirely possible that the feature’s mediocre box office gross will only result in the director’s firing and a quasi-reboot down the road. Negative 60%? Studios often take that when their movie gets spit on by pretty much the entire critical base in the blogosphere. This is a win.