While it was superhero movies that helped support the summer blockbuster season this year, it's horror movies that are proving to be the biggest success stories of 2017. This year has been littered with popular, scary titles, including M. Night Shyamalan's Split, Jordan Peele's Get Out, David Sanberg's Annabelle: Creation, and Andres Muschietti's IT - and now you can add Chris Landon's Happy Death Day to that roster! Check out this weekend's full top 10 below!
It's a somewhat rare occurrence to have a Friday the 13th in the middle of October, adding a nice extra touch of spookiness to the season, and Hollywood celebrated the date with a new hit horror movie. Going into the weekend, box office prognosticators estimated that Happy Death Day would pull in $17-18 million in its first three days - which would have been a solid win given that the production had a reported budget of only $4.8 million. As it turns out, however, a lot more people were interested in the homicidal take on Groundhog Day than expected, and it looks like the final total is going to lock in at $26.5 million. Making more than five times your budget in your opening weekend is a major victory.
The numbers for Happy Death Day surely have the folks over at Blumhouse Productions very happy - but the reality is that they've been happy all year. While not all of their movies have clicked, you may have noticed that they produced three of the five huge horror hits that were mentioned in the opening paragraph. This hopefully only spells only great things for the future, as a good chunk of that money will surely go towards making other microbudget projects - and if those turn out as well as some of the ones we've seen this year, there is a bright cinematic future ahead (perhaps including a Happy Death Day 2?)
The results for Happy Death Day are definitely something to cheer for if you're a movie fan - but the rest of the board isn't super pretty. To start, it seems that positive buzz wasn't enough to help Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049, as a disappointing opening weekend last time around was followed by a 53 percent drop in Week Two. To date that means the feature has only grossed $60 million domestically, and that isn't fantastic when you consider the film took $150 million to make (not including marketing costs). Foreign numbers certainly do help the situation, as those markets have added an additional $98 million to the global total - but there is still something poetic about the box office performance. After all, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner was a notorious flop back in the summer of 1982. Of course, given the quality of Blade Runner 2049, it too will probably go on to generate an intense cult following in the decades to come, and it will ultimately be looked back upon as an epic, under-seen gem.
The other major new release of the week, Martin Campbell's The Foreigner, didn't exactly light things up either. The Jackie Chan-starring action thriller earned an A- CinemaScore, but still only managed to make $12.8 million in its first frame (only about 37 percent of the $35 million budget). This is about half of what Liam Neeson's Taken made back when it was first released in January of 2009, and makes us wonder how much life is left in the "aging action star avenges his family" subgenre.
Next week will see another big crop of new features hitting wide release, and there is definitely quite a bit of variety. It will probably be Tyler Perry's sequel, Boo 2! A Madea Halloween that ends up on the top of the charts, but all the same it will be competing against the sci-fi action feature Geostorm, the true story-inspired Only The Brave, the serial killer thriller The Snowman, and the inspirational drama Same Kind of Different As Me. Come back on Sunday to see how it all shakes out!
