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Halloween scares up $31m debut
04/09/2007 11:49 - (SA)
Los Angeles - Halloween came early and closed Hollywood's strong summer season with a record-breaking Labour Day weekend debut.
Rob Zombie's new take on John Carpenter's 1978 horror sensation Halloween slashed its way to a $31m haul over the four-day weekend, surpassing the $20.1m gross for 2005's Transporter 2, which had held the record for best Labour Day opening.
Released by the Weinstein Co and MGM, Halloween also topped the $29m Labour Day gross for 1999's The Sixth Sense, which had been the biggest-grossing movie over the holiday. That blockbuster ghost story was in its fifth weekend when Labour Day came around.
Sony's comedy Superbad, the No 1 movie the previous two weekends, slipped to second place with $15.6m, raising its total to $92.4m.
Focus Features' Balls of Fury, a comedy about a washed-up ping-pong player recruited by the feds to help bring down a criminal mastermind (Christopher Walken), opened at No 3 with $13.8m.
Death Sentence, 20th Century Fox's revenge thriller starring Kevin Bacon, debuted at No 8 with $5.2m.
New overall record
Led by Halloween, Hollywood set a new overall record for Labour Day, with the top-12 movies taking in $119.6m, surpassing the previous high of $106.1m in 2003.
"Halloween was far beyond anything we've seen on Labour Day," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracker Media By Numbers. "It was just a perfect ending to a perfect summer. Hopefully, we can do this every year."
The industry finished the summer season with record receipts of $4.18bn since the first weekend in May.
Factoring in higher ticket prices, though, movie attendance did not set a record. Media By Numbers estimates 610 million tickets were sold, the fifth-best admissions figure for modern Hollywood.
Unlike Carpenter's original, Zombie's Halloween delved into the childhood of unstoppable slasher Michael Myers to explain why the masked madman wages his own personal war of terror.
"Carpenter's genius was in not giving the back-story, so you had this force of evil unto itself," said Bob Weinstein, co-founder of the Weinstein Co.
Tidy profit
"Rob was more like, what's behind the evil? I think the fan base loved the idea that there'd be a new version that would also add something to it."
Halloween will turn a tidy profit even if it follows the pattern of most horror films and drops off quickly in subsequent weekends.
The movie was shot on a modest $15m budget, meaning it took in twice its production costs in just four days.
The movie was a renewed success for the horror genre, which had hit hard times with a few underperforming releases earlier this year, among them Hostel II.
"It's funny how Hollywood keeps writing things off," said Weinstein, whose company also scored a summer success with the supernatural tale 1408.
"After Hostel II, they said horror's done. Horror's not done. If there's something unique in the story, nothing's done."
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South Africa
