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APEX Hollywood Shortlist: Mars Attacks (Again!) as The Martian Orbits Back into First Place at the B.O. with an Estimated $15.9M

October 26, 2015  | Written by Tomas Romero

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APEX Insight: Everything old is new again as The Martian zaps past four new releases to re-secure the top spot at the box office in a sleepy, pre-Halloween weekend with $15.9M.

With Back to the Future day grabbing all the pop culture headlines last week – Oct. 21, 2015, the date in the future that Michael J. Fox’s character Marty McFly time traveled to in the film series – it’s kind of ironic that a film from the past re-emerged to take the top spot at the B.O. with an estimated $15.9M. But that’s exactly what happened with Ridley Scott’s The Martian. Closing in on Gladiator’s lifetime domestic haul of $187.7M with $166.3M, Martian is just a week or so away from becoming the highest grossing domestic hit of Scott’s career; which is really saying something considering the Oscar-nominated director has helmed such modern classics as Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise and Alien.

Stirring up the cauldron in fourth place with an estimated $10.8M was Vin Diesel’s The Last Witch Hunter. Proving that he can play more than a pumped up gearhead in a fast and furious hot rod, Diesel portrays an immortal witch hunter seeking to prevent a killer plague from decimating New York City in the film. Hunter also stars Oscar-winner Michael Caine, Elijah Wood and Downton Abbey and Game of Thrones’ Free Folk “spearwife” Rose Leslie. And if the sequel chatter rings true, you can count on Diesel and company to cast a pretty wicked spell on the box office again sometime in 2017 or beyond.

Also opening wide with some spooky seasonal scares of its own was Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension, which took in an estimated $8.2M over the weekend. The sixth and final entry in the hugely popular found footage horror series, Ghost Dimension is the first of the Paranormal Activity films to be shot and released in 3-D, which means those freaky sisters from the previous films had access to some seriously cool home video equipment in 1988. It also means the scary parts will be much more realistic, so, hang on to your 3-D glasses!

And though the Bill Murray rock’n’roll travelogue Rock the Kasbah and the big-screen adaptation of the cult 1980s animated series Jem and the Holograms both failed to crack the top ten with $1.5M and $1.3M, respectively, things aren’t all doom and gloom in music on the movie front.

Murray comedies tend to be have staying power in the long run and anyone who remembers how hard the original cartoon version of Jem and the Holograms rocked on their syndicated TV show in their heyday knows those girls won’t go down without a fight. To paraphrase another ’80s classic: “Nobody puts Jem in a corner,” and that goes double for her Holograms. So, expect this totally rad girl group to have a seriously tubular encore on the home market.

Weekend Box Office Estimates: October 23 – 25, 2015