Box Office Week: Another terrible week for new releases as Jigsaw takes #1 with a mediocre $16.2M, Thank You for Your Service disappoints at #6 with $3.7M, and Suburbicon is the worst wide release in Paramount history at #9 with $2.8M. Also Blade Runner 2049 bombs in China, opening at #3 with $7.6M

Rank	Title	Domestic Gross (Weekend)	Worldwide Gross (Cume)	Week #
1	Jigsaw	$16,250,000	$25,750,000	1
2	Tyler Perry's Boo 2! A Madea Halloween	$10,000,000	$35,729,532	1
3	Geostorm	$5,675,000	$136,953,368	2
4	Happy Death Day	$5,099,000	$68,593,525	3
5	Blade Runner 2049	$5,099,000	$6,010,000	1

Notable Box Office Stories:

• It's hard to know why a franchise as immensely profitable as Saw ever dies, but now that Jigsaw has returned to the same small scale standards maybe it won't be another seven years between films as Jigsaw opened to a bog standard mediocre $16.2M. Normally returning to a franchise with the second worst opening of the series (Saw VI still holds the franchise low opening with $14.1M when it was notably beaten by Paranormal Activity in it's 5th week of release) is a pretty dire thing but Jigsaw's opening can be excused for two reasons. For one this weekend faced stiff competition for attention outside of the multiplex as Friday saw the release of Stranger Things on Netflix, a pretty exciting World Series, and plenty of people out for Halloween parties since the actual holiday falls on a Tuesday. In fact one wonder if Lionsgate isn't kicking itself a little for opening earlier, as initial tracking had this possibly opening above $20M. Horror films don't tend to do well on Halloween as much as the lead up to it because as stated most people are either out with kids trick-or-treating or trying to hook up with Wonder Woman/Captain America/both, so it's possible Lionsgate wanted to soften the blow of a bad return to the franchise with "oops bad timing".

• Jigsaw (cont.) Second reason this opening is fine is that the series is know for it's cheap production value, with this current entry only costing $10M to make. Looking at the original 7 film run of Saw it's not too shocking of a rise and fall, mirroring the slasher movies of the 80s and 90s. The initial Saw was a major indie hit then, with the box office peaking with II and then steadily declining until VI which was a major down grade with V making a total of $55.1M and VI making a total of $27.6M. Clearly Lionsgate panic that in just one year the drop was so intense so they went full gimmick for the seventh film called Saw 3D who's gimmick should be obvious. This pushed the costs up to $20M and while the film did better than VI it wasn't enough to say here's the right route for the series. Still the reason this is so odd to me is that Saw is so damn cheap and it can be done cheaper. The combined total budget for the series is under $100M for all eight film, yet worldwide the series has grossed almost $900M. With Lionsgate a bit desperate for sequels and Jigsaw finally giving a possible Tobin Bell free solution to continue the franchise it's very likely that Lionsgate won't be so ashamed of Jigsaw II (and yes I 100% guarantee if there is a sequel it will be called Jigsaw II because fuck you).

• Thank You For Your Service - Poor Miles Teller. After years of poorly reviewed flops, he's finally in two well reviewed films that were released a week apart...and both were flops. Last week it was Only the Brave and now it's Thank You For Your Service which opened at #6 to $3.7M. The film has had an odd life and an example of how a film can completely change from a major player to something that well opens at #6. The film was originally going to be directed by Stephen Spielberg in 2013 based on an acclaimed David Frankel book and written by Jason Dean Hall who was hot off the heels of American Sniper's incredible success (which he also wrote). However the film was stuck in development hell for two years before Hall took over as director while Spielberg's Dreamworks/Amblin still on board as producers. Without that big of a cache and 4 years out from the initial book's publication the heat had completely dissipated from this film. The only hope it really had was getting major awards contention but while the reviews are good they weren't good enough to really push for Teller or Hall in any meaningful way. Generally when a major director leaves a project it dies off but Thank You For Your Service is the odd film that actually managed to crawl all the way to the box office and then die.

• Suburbicon - That said even a director with a lot of clout can still make a bomb as George Clooney's latest broke a lot of bad records as it opened at #9 to a horrendous $2.8M. That performance marked career worst for Clooney as a director, Matt Damon as a leading man, and most shocking of all is the worst wide release in modern history for Paramount. This release is an unmitigated disaster so what the hell happened? Well first off the film was a mess in the marketing from the beginning. The ads played off the social satire of the film portraying it more as a comedy leading to Clooney often repeating that the film was supposed to be a drama. If the marketing and the director can't even agree on the basic genre of the film you have a major problem on your hands. Then there's the issue of reviews of which Suburbicon was hammered, due in large part to how mismanaged the tone of the film was. Then finally there's the Cinemascore which Suburbicon scored at the second worst grade possible a D- and even scored an F from people over the age of 50 which made up half the audience. This year we've seen a lot of discussion about the lack of authorial control in Hollywood as major studio shake-ups like the firings in Star Wars for instance noting that producers have become the real auteurs over directors. Paramount is an odd beast in this change as it still pushes for these kinds of mid budget projects from named directors but because of that the results can be very up or down. Paramount had two big Oscar hits (in an otherwise also terrible year for them) with Arrival and Fences but putting the same kind of trust in successful directors this year gave them mother!, Suburbicon, and a possible third auteur flop with Downsizing. As these kinds of films fail (and fail more spectacularly every year), it's more and more likely that these kinds of films aren't going to be made any more. I think we are beginning to see the era of the blank check disappear and especially ones cashed for major hit and miss directors like Clooney and Aronofsky.

Films Reddit Wants to Follow

This is a segment where we keep a weekly tally of currently showing films that aren't in the Top 5 that fellow redditors want updates on. If you'd like me to add a film to this chart, make a comment in this thread.

Title	Domestic Gross (Cume)	Worldwide Gross (Cume)	Budget	Week #
Wonder Woman	$412,534,079	$821,634,079	$149M	22
Cars 3	$152,891,050	$378,957,462	$175M	20
Spider-man: Homecoming	$333,823,060	$879,788,844	$175M	17
Dunkirk	$187,790,889	$523,890,889	$100M	15
IT	$323,730,202	$666,630,202	$35M	8

Notable Film Closings

Title	Domestic Gross	Worldwide Gross	Budget
Baby Driver	$107,825,862	$226,843,166	$34M
mother!	$17,800,004	$42,991,775	$30M

As always /r/boxoffice is a great place to share links and other conversations about box office news.

Also you can see the archive of all Box Office Week posts at /r/moviesboxoffice.

Submitted October 31, 2017 at 12:33AM by mi-16evil http://ift.tt/2yZQ7JY