That Was One Terrible Weekend at The Box Office ~ Cinenus

Universal Pictures

It’s a harsh guarantee in Hollywood that every so often a film is going to have a bad opening at the box office. But it’s a true testament to how unconquerable and unpredictable of a beast the box office can be when every wide-release of the weekend horribly fails. That’s exactly what happened this past weekend. Variety has dubbed it a “pre-Halloween massacre” while others have compared it to the bottom of a toilet, and though more jabs are sure to come, none are more wince-inducing than the numbers themselves.

Jem And The Holograms, The Last Witch Hunter, Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension, Rock the Kasbah, and more shockingly the critically-lauded Steve Jobs all opened on Friday and were all chewed up and spit out as flops come Monday. The five films opened in thousands of theaters and found themselves clobbered by the likes of box office winners The Martian, Goosebumps, and Bridge Of Spies which have for the most part remained in their positions since their openings earlier this month.

Vin Diesel’s The Last Witch Hunter, with a sizeable budget of $70m, was anticipated to bring in as much as $17m. By the end of the weekend, it found itself sitting at number four, only having grossed $10.8m across 3,082 theaters.

Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension was only shown in 1,600 theaters, with Paramount testing a new distribution strategy where films have a shorter theater run in order to get them on home video sooner. Despite the understanding that the strategy would affect the opening numbers, the movie still did worse than the studio’s projections of $10 to $12m. The fifth installment in the horror franchise finished the weekend with only $8.2m, the lowest opening ever for the franchise.

Steve Jobs is the most interesting of the bunch simply for the fact that failure was inconceivable given how much the biopic had going for it. The Danny Boyle-directed, Aaron Sorkin-penned film cost $30m and had an equally expensive marketing campaign. Its limited-release run was impressive as well, fueling projections which reached as high as $20m. Yet despite those factors and all the pervasive hype, controversy, and acclaim, the film as of yesterday has only grossed $10m from 2,433 theaters. An even more cringe-worthy fact is that the film’s initial haul of $7.3m just barely beat out the $6.7m haul of the much-criticized oft-forgotten Jobs of 2013 starring Ashton Kutcher.

Despite the failings of the aforementioned weekend flops, the worst fates were left for Bill Murray’s Rock The Kasbah and the grossly unnecessary Jem And The Holograms. Neither major-studio film cracked $1.6m. Rock The Kasbah, with a budget of $15m and projections of $5m, finished the weekend with a gross of only $1.5m from 2,012 theaters while Jem fared even worse. The musical-drama based on the 1980s animated TV series finished with just $1.3m from 2,413 theaters with initial projections between $4 and $5m and a budget of $5m. Both films are now two of the lowest openings of all time for studio films released in 2,000 or more theaters in history. In fact, Jem sits at number three on that list just behind 2008’s Delgo and 2012’s Oogieloves.

Whatever two movies those may be.

Cinenus

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Tuesday, 27 October 2015