“30 Days Of Night” Tops Box Office With Pre-Halloween Horror
Posted October 21, 2007 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
It’s not quite Halloween yet, but movie fans were obviously in the mood a little early, as horror tale ” 30 Days of Night” had three days of box-office bite and debuted as the weekend’s No. 1 movie with $16 million.
All in all it was a down weekend for Hollywood though, as audiences largely ignored the latest crop of heavy Academy Awards hopefuls including them Ben Affleck’s ” Gone Baby Gone,” Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal’s ” Rendition” and Halle Berry and Benicio Del Toro’s ” Things We Lost in the Fire.”
“Fall is the season of the serious movie, and it seems like audiences in a way are resisting the serious movie right now,” said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracker Media By Numbers. “Audiences are finding their horror or their intensity in real life, and they’re not looking for it in the movies.”
That explains why last week’s No. 1 film, ” Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married?” stayed strong in its second week with $12.1 million and previous champ ” The Game Plan” held up well at No. 3 with $8.1 million on the strength of some good family fun.
Further proof that movie fans want fun over adversity came when a 3-D version of Disney’s Halloween perennial ” Tim Burton’s the Nightmare Before Christmas” was No. 8 with $5.1 million and had a better rate of return per-theatre than any of the new wide releases.
“There’s just so much serious fare. We have overloaded the marketplace with this highbrow, serious product,” said Chris Aronson, senior vice-president of distribution for 20th Century Fox. “The audience is saying, `Give me something to have some fun with.”‘
Fun movies were sombre news for the box office take however, where the overall haul skidded for the fifth-straight weekend as the top-12 movies took in $79.7 million, down 10 per cent from the same weekend last year.
Here’s the rest of the weekend’s top 10, with all figures estimated according to Media By Numbers LLC.
1. “30 Days of Night,” $16 million.
2. “Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married?”, $12.1 million.
3. “The Game Plan,” $8.1 million.
4. “Michael Clayton,” $7.1 million.
5. “Gone Baby Gone,” $6 million.
6. “The Comebacks,” $5.85 million.
7. “We Own the Night,” $5.5 million.
8. “Tim Burton’s the Nightmare Before Christmas,” $5.1 million.
9. “Rendition,” $4.2 million.
10. “The Heartbreak Kid,” $3.9 million.
