Weekend Box Office Results for October 23-25, 2009 - Box Office Mojo

Weekend Box Office Results for October 23-25, 2009

It was not a very rewarding weekend for investors, unless you're the guy who put up the twenty bucks needed to make Paranormal Activity, which vaulted into the #1 spot despite being in far fewer theaters than the films which finished two through ten.

The three new wide releases all finished far short of expectations.

• Worst of all relative to expectations was Saw VI, which could do no better than $14 million. That's less than half of Saw V's opening. That franchise seems to have run its theatrical course. I, for one, will not miss it. In fact, I'm glad to see that torture porn films have been failing quite consistently.
  
• Astro Boy had the tenth-worst opening weekend of all time among saturated openers (3000 theaters or more). It was the third 2009 film to make the bottom ten, joining Imagine That and Shorts. (And another film from this year, Aliens in the Attic, just missed joining them on that list!) The lesson seems to be that shoddy kiddie movies don't get a free pass from family audiences.
  
• Cirque du Freak would also have joined that same list if it had been in just a few more theaters. In fact it did worse than Astro Boy, as measured by either total gross or revenues per-theater basis.
  

  The only bright spot was the week's limited release, the Amelia Earhart biopic, which actually did a bit better than expected and took in a respectable $5000 per screen, despite reviews which ranged from "I was bored" to "serviceable." It actually pulled in more per screen than Saw VI. Indeed, it pulled in more per screen than every other film except the phenomenal Paranormal Activity.
  

The weekend was about 10% behind the comparable weekend last year, mostly because of a respectable debut from last year's champ, High School Musical 3.