Against four weak new releases and some sharply dropping Halloween horror, ‘Argo’ managed to quietly take first place at the box office with $12.4 million. Ben Affleck’s latest drama seems to be cementing his status as one of the few actors who has successfully transitioned from actor to director with nary a hiccup.
The weak new releases also provided ‘Hotel Transylvania’ with an opportunity to move from fourth to second place, despite raking in only $9.5 million in its fifth weekend out. Still, the movie isn’t performing too shabbily; the Adam Sandler-led kiddie comedy has grossed $130.4 million against its $85 million budget.
The difficult to describe (and apparently difficult to market) sci-fi drama-romance ‘Cloud Atlas’ debuted in third place with $9.4 million. That’s the lowest-ever nationwide launch for the Wachowski siblings and it doesn’t look like the movie will exactly rise in the ranks in coming weeks. Like another thinly connected multi-plot epic, ‘The Fountain’, ‘Cloud Atlas’ had a plot that was difficult to sell in promos due to the jumpy nature of the plotline; it’s not getting strong word of mouth, either, which further hurts it.
All the way down in fourth place this week, we have last week’s number one finished: ‘Paranormal Activity 4’ plummeted 70.1% with a pull of just $8.7 million, the worst second-week drop of the franchise. Ouch!
Fifth place wound up being a tie between two sequels: ‘Taken 2’ and ‘Silent Hill: Revelation 3D’. ‘Taken 2’ earned $8 million this weekend to bring its month-long domestic total to just over $117 million; that means it’s outpacing its predecessor by about $22 million, which will surely please the execs at Fox.
‘Silent Hill: Revelation 3D’ on the other hand pulled in $8 million against a $20 million budget and is sorely lagging behind the original film. There’s little brand relevance at this point in time and competition from other horror films, so it probably won’t rise higher on the chart after this week.
For the other new releases of the week, it’s even worse. ‘Fun Size’ opened way down in tenth place with only $4 million against its $14 million budget, but ‘Chasing Mavericks’ had it even worse: the surfing flick opened at #13 with just $2.2 million against a $20 million budget. It doesn’t look like either movie will come close to cracking the top five before they exit the theatre altogether.
Way to go Ben! Put those nay-sayers in their place…