Hollywood Shortlist: Ouija Proves it’s Anyone’s (Board) Game in Race for B.O. Supremacy
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Forget Freddie vs. Jason, the bloodiest battle this Halloween was between Open Road’s Nightcrawler and Universal’s Ouija, which spent most of the holiday weekend embroiled in a statistical dead head for first place at the North American box office. And though Jake Gyllenhaal’s dark, critically-acclaimed performance in Nightcrawler is already generating serious award season buzz – and now has a $10.4 million opening weekend to show for it – when all was said and done, Universal’s Ouija scared off the competition to take first place for the second week in a row with a slim $300,000 lead over Nightcrawler and a three day haul of $10.7 million.
Well on track to earn at least $50 million domestically, the micro-budgeted Ouija’s total box office take to date is a healthy $34.8 million. Which should be music to the ears of Hasbro executives whose long-rumored adaptation of the board game classic Candy Land is looking to pave the way for future board game-to-movie adaptations after such epic misfires as 2012’s Battleship and 1985’s Clue.
Also holding strong after over a month in theatres is director David Fincher’s Ben Affleck/Rosamund Pike starrer Gone Girl (FOX) which took fifth place over the weekend with $8.4 million in ticket sales. Adapted from the best-selling novel by Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl recently topped 2008’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button ($127.5 million) as Fincher’s highest grossing film to date with $136.2 million.
Rounding out the top five were Sony’s Brad Pitt-led Fury in third place with $8.8 million and $60.1 million to date and FOX’s lavish, computer animated ode to Dia de Los Muertos, The Book of Life, which took fifth place with $8.2 million and $40.4 million to date.
But perhaps the scariest news of all over the traditionally slow Halloween weekend were the final numbers for Lionsgate’s 10th Anniversary re-release of the torture horror classic, Saw, which garnered $650K in a little over 2,000 theatres for the shockingly low per screen average of $315 per venue. Yikes, I don’t think even my Ouija board saw that one coming!