'Happy Death Day' Exceeds Expectations
by EG
It's hard to beat horror movies at the box office these days. This week, the small-budget horror flick Happy Death Day easily sailed past the big-budget sci-fi flick Blade Runner 2049, which debuted to disappointing ticket sales last week. Thanks to a strong showing from Stephen King's It, horror movies have now ruled the box office for four of the past five weeks, and no other genre has been able to come close to ending horror's dominance.
Getting an early jump on Halloween, Universal and Blumhouse's Happy Death Day opened over the weekend to a strong $26.5 million from 3,149 theaters in another win for the horror genre.
The microbudgeted pic, directed by Christopher Landon and rated PG-13, stars Jessica Rothe as a college student who relives the day of her murder over and over until she discovers her killer's identity. Happy Death Day cost a mere $5 million to produce, and follows the success of Universal and Blumhouse's other 2017 titles, Get Out and Split.
Happy Death Day skewed female (54 percent), while young moviegoers turned out in droves to see the horror-thriller. More than 65 percent of ticket buyers were under the age of 25. Overseas, the movie opened to $5 million from its first 11 markets for a global bow of $31.5 million.
In North America, Happy Death Day easily trounced holdover Blade Runner 2049, which declined 54 percent to $15.1 million in its second weekend for an early domestic cume of $60.6 million. The Alcon Entertainment, Sony and Warner Bros. movie cost a net $150 million to produce, so it has a long way to before landing in the black.
Overseas, Blade Runner 2049 took in another $29.3 million for a foreign tally of $98 million and a global cume of $158.6 million to date. If Sunday estimates are correct, it narrowly lost the foreign box-office crown to Chinese hit Never Say Die, which grossed $30 million in China for a total $278 million. Blade Runner 2049 doesn't open in China and Japan until Oct. 27, although it debuted to a soft $1.7 million in South Korea over the weekend. (By way of comparison, recent Hollywood event pic Kingsman: The Golden Circle debuted to nearly $17 million in South Korea.)
STXfilms’ action-thriller The Foreigner placed No. 3 domestically with $12.8 million from 2,515 theaters. That's a solid start for a film that cost a reported $35 million to make and has already earned more than $88 million internationally. (The U.S.-China co-production is set to open in China on Friday.)
Get the rest of the story at The Hollywood Reporter.
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