Weekend Wrap-Up: Halloween Scares Up Record Candy

MaryAnn Johanson,  Sep 04, 2007

Crap. That's not just a commentary on the movies that dominated the box office this long holiday weekend. It's an exclamation of despair: we're surely in for more bad movies, and more bad movies that aren't shown to critics before they open.

Look: Halloween, metal monster Rob Zombie's retread of the John Carpenter film, scared up $31 million from Friday through the holiday Monday. That makes it the topper of the biggest Labor Day weekend ever, and the capper of the biggest summer at the box office ever. (Dollar wise, that is, not attendance wise, though May through yesterday was still the fifth best summer as far as numbers of tickets sold, at 610 million. The total take for the season: $4.2 billion. With a b.)

Quoted at CNN.com, Paul Dergarabedian, president of box office tracker Media By Numbers, had this to say:

"'Halloween' was far beyond anything we've seen on Labor Day. It was just a perfect ending to a perfect summer. Hopefully, we can do this every year."

Please, no. Halloween is currently idling at 22 percent Fresh at Rotten Tomatoes, that is, the consensus is that it's pretty darn rotten, or so say those critics who ventured out to the 'plexes to see the movie this weekend, which they had to do, since the movie was not screened in advance for us. (This has been a record year for movies held from critics, too ... and some critics are getting pretty annoyed about it.) More good movies, please, not crappy ones. No matter how much money they make.

At No. 2 and No. 3 this weekend were two films that were shown to critics, but that many of us trashed anyway. Which just goes to show that while bad reviews can sink a film, they don't always do so. Superbad -- I hated it -- earned $15.6 million, and Balls of Fury -- ditto -- made $13.8 million. Bad reviews probably didn't have a lot to do with the weekend's other new wide release, Death Sentence, doing so poorly that it came in at No. 8 with a deadly $5.2 million. It was shown to critics, but at least in my neck of the woods, not until very late on the night before it opened, which kept the bad reviews, like mine, from getting in front of readers' eyes before some of them had bought tickets.

In news of quality films, Box Office Mojo notes that this weekend, the charming Ratatouille and the exciting The Bourne Ultimatum became the seventh and eighth movies of 2007 to pass the $200 million mark. See, good movies can make a lot of money.

[Box office numbers via Box Office Mojo.]

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MaryAnn Johanson (email me)
reviews, reviews, reviews! at FlickFilosopher.com