Box Office Week: Happy Death Day surprises at #1 with an excellent $26.5M, The Foreigner comes in at #3 with a solid $12.8M, and Professor Marston & The Wonder Women has a disasterous opening at #14 with $737K.

Rank	Title	Domestic Gross (Weekend)	Worldwide Gross (Cume)	Week #
1	Happy Death Day	$26,500,000	$31,500,000	1
2	Blade Runner 2049	$15,100,000	$158,578,387	2
3	The Foreigner	$12,840,000	$101,240,000	1
4	IT	$6,050,000	$630,629,521	6
5	The Mountain Between Us	$5,650,000	$30,204,367	2

Notable Box Office Stories:

• While WB has been getting much deserved attention for IT many have forgotten one of the main leaders of this horror boom started out this year with incredible success and have come back with another out of the park hit as Blumhouse's latest horror film Happy Death Day opened at #1 to an excellent $26.5M. The studio started out 2017 with two monster hits, Split and Get Out, but haven't had a straight up horror release since February. A big advantage for Happy Death Day is its premise, a mix of Groundhog's Day and Scream which allowed for some clever marketing that skewed young. The PG-13 rating also meant the film was more teen friendly and broke an impressive 9 week run of the #1 film at the box office being R-rated. The film scored mediocre reviews but did manage a B rating on Cinemascore. That's the same score that Don't Breathe scored and it too opened to $26M and held incredibly well, closing out its domestic run at $89.2M. Happy Death Day probably won't have quick as great a run as Don't Breathe as that film came out in the very forgiving time of late August and October released horror films tend to drop off significantly after Halloween, so there's probably very limited shelf life here. It doesn't really matter though as with every Blumhouse release the budget is insanely small, this time $4.8M, so the film is already heading towards success. 2017 is going to be the year horror becomes one of the dominant forces in the industry and increasing the only safe bet for both major and minor studios.

• It's clearly not 1997 when The Foreigner a film from "the director of Goldeneye" starring Pierce Brosnan and Jackie Chan opens at #3 with $12.8M. However this is indeed 2017 and it's been a long time since we saw the three main collaborators in this film on the big screen. First up is the director Martin Campbell who seems to have finished his sentence in director jail after delivering the 2011 disaster Green Lantern. Then there's Pierce Brosnan who hasn't lead a film since the surprise minor hit No Escape. And then of course there's Jackie Chan who hasn't had a non-animated major US release since The Karate Kid back in 2010. So yes as much cultural sway as these men once had there's a reason they are now making a film for $35M and released by perennial suffering distributor STX who have had an extremely rough year. Despite all that because of the lower expectations of the budget the opening for The Foreigner is actually pretty solid. There were some concerns that the trailers misrepresented how much screen time Jackie Chan has in the film and because of him being front and center of the marketing however it seems people don't mind as the film scored an excellent A- on Cinemascore. People in China also don't seem to mind as the film opened to a fabulous $66M over there already pushing the worldwide gross to over $100M. With most of the crowd being over the age of 35, The Foreigner should hold well and maintain as a solid choice for the older action crowd.

• I've always disliked when a film's financial failings are blamed on it's societal values because the truth is 99.9% of the time a film fails because of extremely classic business reasons. It might be easy for some to blame the terrible opening of Professor Marston and the Wonder Women at #14 with $737,000 on telling the true story of the polyamorous couple that created Wonder Woman complete with sympathetic takes on multi-sexual partners and BDSM but really that just ignores the bigger issue, this film had no market saturation at all. Everything about Annapurna's release strategy was wrong. First up was timing. It's very clear they were hopeful that the film would piggyback off the success of Wonder Woman, but that film has been in release for 20 weeks now, so any immediate hype for the subject matter is long gone. Then there was the release as Annapurna chose to release direct to over 1,000 cinemas without first testing the waters in a smaller release then expanding wide with that generated hype. Finally there was just no marketing push for this film at all. By placing themselves too far away from Wonder Woman and without any awards hype Annapurna was just stuck and while they had some clever posters there was just no visibility for this film at all. Look I'm no fool. I know that there are certainly people who don't want to see Professor Marston for its subject matter but focusing solely on that group ignores the larger context. So next time someone says a film failed because of its liberal/conservative values just remember that films of all kinds succeed and fail and frankly most of the time it comes down to business not politics.

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	$412,438,665	$821,438,665	$149M	20
Cars 3	$152,750,524	$376,750,524	$175M	18
Baby Driver	$107,796,728	$226,323,496	$34M	16
Spider-man: Homecoming	$333,245,428	$879,255,850	$175M	15
Dunkirk	$187,400,175	$522,900,175	$100M	13

Notable Film Closings

Title	Domestic Gross	Worldwide Gross	Budget
Wolf Warrior 2	$2,721,034	$870,325,373	$30M
Girls Trip	$115,108,515	$136,307,840	$19M
Wish Upon	$14,301,505	$20,743,742	$12M
Detroit	$16,790,139	$21,051,405	$34M

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 16, 2017 at 11:06PM by mi-16evil http://ift.tt/2yu2gbw