Hasbro has been having a good year. Transformers: Age of Extinction, a hateful movie if ever there was one, is 2014's biggest global grosser, having hauled in over a billion dollars worldwide.
With its blockbuster game tight, Hasbro has now notched a big victory in the tiny-budget horror arena: Oujia earned an estimated $20.0 million from 2,858 locations in the U.S. and Canada, all at a production cost reported to be around $3 million.
The feature directorial debut of Stiles White, Oujia managed to ride out a critical shellacking and indifference from anyone who actually saw the movie thanks to a marketing effort that targeted young moviegoers and included the first-ever integrated shilling effort on Snapchat. Ouija brought out young moviegoers in force. 75% of attendees were under the age of 25 years old.
Ouija will burn off as quickly as your average horror movie, which tends to extinguish demand in the first week or so, but John Wick could stand pretty tall over the weeks to come. Keanu Reeves returns to dual-pistol gunslinging with the straightforward revenge movie, which debuted in 2,589 theaters and grossed $14.1 million, according to current estimates.
John Wick ought to hold better than Oujia, which will virtually disappear after Halloween. The film marks Reeves's addition to the stilly-yet-stripped-down action genre of which Liam Neeson is currently king.
St. Vincent expanded from 68 locations to 2,282. In the process, the Bill Murray/Melissa McCarthy dramedy earned an estimated $8.0 million. That's small shakes compared to McCarthy's recent output, but the more modest St. Vincent has been pushed more as a Murray movie, so it's not quite an apples-to-apples comparison.
Here are the top ten movies in North America for the weekend of October 24-26:
1. Ouija...........................................................$20.0 million...............New Release
2. John Wick..................................................$14.1 million...............New Release
3. Fury............................................................$13.0 million...............$46.0 million
4. Gone Girl....................................................$11.1 million...............$124.0 million
5. The Book of Life........................................$9.8 million.................$29.9 million
6. St. Vincent.................................................$8.0 million.................$9.1 million
7. Alexander and the Terrible.......................$7.0 million.................$45.5 million
8. The Best of Me...........................................$4.7 million.................$17.6 million
9. The Judge...................................................$4.3 million.................$34.3 million
10. Dracula Untold.........................................$4.3 million.................$48.3 million
Overall, October 2014 is looking like the biggest Halloween month on the books, with the top twelve raking in an estimated $102.7 million.
The upcoming Halloween weekend sees the addition of Nightcrawler, Before I Go to Sleep, and a tenth-anniversary re-release of Saw.
