Box Office Weekend: No One Predicted Oujia Win

Critics did not like it. Audiences did not like it. And yet, thanks most likely to its status as one of the few spooky flicks to enjoy during the Halloween season, Ouija took the box office crown with an estimated $20 million. It was still not good news for an overall dipping box office trend, as second place went to the new (and much better received) John Wick. Keanu Reeves made good with an estimated $14.2 million start and good word of mouth, but along with Ouija had no reported budget numbers, so whether Reeves finally has a winner on his hands is undetermined.

Fury (estimated $13 million), Gone Girl (estimated $11.1 million), and The Book of Life (estimated $9.8 million) all stayed in roughly the same positions, if only pushed down by new releases, but only Gone Girl is a winner and the highest earner in the current top ten. Fury and The Book of Life still struggle to make ends meet even with worldwide revenue, despite both getting top marks from critics. St. Vincent, in the meantime, opened to wide release after a third week of playing to smaller crowds, and the Bill Murray comedy-drama added an estimated $8.1 million to its coffers; whether that spells good or bad for its unreported budget, it is a decent uptick from its opening weekend and potentially an answer to the disaster that was Frank Miller’s Sin City: A Dame to Kill For for the Weinstein Company.

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day performed well enough to garner an estimated $7 million and a profit, a task that The Best of Me (estimated $4.7 million), The Judge (estimated $4.3 million), and Dracula Untold (estimated $4.3 million) have yet to do domestically. Interestingly enough, Dracula Untold may be the best of the three domestic duds, as it has massive support from the overseas marker (enough for $166 million in worldwide gross), while The Judge limps in at $53.4 million worldwide. Nicholas Sparks, on the other hand, cannot rekindle the romantic spark of The Notebook as The Best of Me appears destined to crash and burn as the worst of his cinematic adaptations, with not even worldwide gross able to keep the $26 million film from being labelled a bomb.

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Seth Paul

When not failing to write novels and screenplays, box-office guru Seth writes humorous comedy tracks for films under the name "The One Man Band" that can be found at Rifftrax.com. Although, he has recently succeeded in writing the novella "Jack Alan and the Case of the Not-Exactly Rocket Scientists," available as an eBook on Amazon. He is also the English voice of Zak in "Zak McKracken: Between Time and Space."

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