Usually January is a wasteland for the box office, dominated by award bait films, studio dump offs and the sputtering remains of the Christmas blockbusters. This week, one new film braved these difficult days and came out with very respectable numbers.
The Devil Inside debuted on over twenty-two hundred screens, bringing in an estimated thirty-four and a half million dollars. The satanic possession horror film raked in the 3rd highest January opening ever behind Cloverfield and the special edition re-release of Star Wars back in ’97. The movie had a production budget of only one million, which makes this weekend a pretty big win for Paramount.
Coming in second place this weekend was Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol , which continued it’s very impressive run. With another twenty million, it now is on pace to threaten Mission: Impossible 2 as the series’ top grosser. The movie has had several weeks of really solid holds and is proving to be the big winner of the crowded holiday season.
Another of the action spectacle sequels, Sherlock Holmes 2, came in third with an estimated fourteen million. Like Impossible, Holmes 2 had a respectable hold and gained a little ground on the pace of the original. Even with the solid weekend the sequel is still not likely to surpass the original movie’s gross and would be lucky to get passed two hundred million.
The box office as a whole had a strong week, with a big increase over last year’s similarly dated weekend. Next weekend brings in lots of new blood, highlighted by the 3D re-release of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, Mark Wahlberg’s Contraband and the musical themed Joyful Noise.
1 The Devil Inside 34.5$
2 Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol 20.5$
3 Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows 14.0$
4 The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) 11.3$
5 Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked 9.5$
6 War Horse 8.6$
7 We Bought a Zoo 8.4$
8 The Adventures of Tintin 6.6$
9 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy 5.7$
10 New Year’s Eve 3.2$
additional reading
October 2, 2014 at 7:01 amadditional reading
The Flickcast – Curated Geek