Box Office Revenue Dies Over Halloween Weekend

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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It was a horrible weekend for movies. The two leaders — “Nightcrawler” and “Ouija” — cratered over the three-day Halloween period. Each took in $10.9 million. On many weekends, that would barely put either film into fourth or fifth place. Maybe the two movies weren’t so horrible. Maybe there were other reasons each failed so dismally.

According to Box Office Mojo:

The Top 12 earned an estimated $81.9 million, which makes this one of the slowest weekends of the year. That can partly be attributed to the “Halloween effect”: moviegoers were preoccupied with other activities on Friday, which set the weekend back quite a bit.

This is a chicken-and-egg sort of thing, though: fearing this Halloween effect, the big studios avoided the date entirely. Had someone stepped up to the plate with a broadly appealing offering, the aggregate box office wouldn’t be nearly as low.

That does not negate the fact that both movies cost much more than $11 million to make. Also, film grosses almost never rise in their second weekend after release. This past weekend was the first for “Nightcrawler” and second for “Ouija.” The grosses for both will drop again during the upcoming weekend.

By the way, to put the failure of the two movies into some context, the top-grossing movie release last quarter, “Gone Girl,” has taken in $641 million.

“Nightcrawler” and “Ouija” each will be lucky if it brings in $50 million over its time in theaters. Some movies make money. These two almost certainly will not, unless perhaps, they do well in the world of streaming or DVDs.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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