Box Office Week: In a bevy of weak releases Boo 2! A Madea Halloween is #1 with $21.6M. Meanwhile Geostorm bombs opening at #2 with $13.3M on a $120M budget, Only The Brave flops at #5 with $6M, The Snowman crashes at #8 with $3.4M, and Same Kind of Different as Me makes no impact at #12 with $2.5M.

Rank	Title	Domestic Gross (Weekend)	Worldwide Gross (Cume)	Week #
1	Tyler Perry's Boo 2! A Madea Halloween	$21,650,000	$21,650,000	1
2	Geostorm	$13,300,000	$62,900,000	1
3	Happy Death Day	$9,375,000	$53,583,365	2
4	Blade Runner 2049	$7,155,000	$194,105,203	3
5	Only The Brave	$6,010,000	$6,010,000	1

Notable Box Office Stories:

• In a stunning upset Tyler Perry's Boo 2! A Madea Halloween somehow topped The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature for the most cumbersome movie title of 2017...oh and it was #1 at the box office this week with $21.6M. Last year's Madea Halloween opened at $28.5M so the while this film is actually the second worst opening for a Madea film it's right on track with the general openings for the franchise. The last film not only opened well but held well too, scoring an A on Cinemascore and ending its run over $75M. Similarly Boo 2 (seriously is that the shortened title? none of this makes sense) scored an A- on Cinemascore and will likely hold at least over $50M. With a built in brand and wisely casting YouTube and Instagram stars that appeal to a young audience plus budgets below $30M, this franchise should hold out for a while in the small niche it's built for itself.

• Oh Geostorm I have been waiting for this moment for nine months. This weekend was a reckoning that's been in the making for three years as Geostorm finally hit theaters and opened at #2 to a shockingly bad $13.3M on a budget of $120M. To put that in perspective, IT made more on it's fourth weekend of release. Everything about Geostorm is a fucking disaster. I wonder if Geostorm is talked about at WB like the Spruce Goose or the Big Dig, a project that they just poured money into fixing and only made it inevitably worse. Shot in 2014 by director Dean Devlin (directorial debut of the producer of films like Independence Day, 2012, and White House Down) the film initially cost $85M and was set to be released on March 25, 2016, a day DC fans will note is the eventual release of BvS. So clearly this film was something WB had total faith in...until it test screened. The screenings were so bad they hired an entire new writer and a new director (Danny Cannon the director of Judge Dredd and I Still Know What You Did Last Summer) and spent $15M on reshoots and an additional $20M on new CGI. They then moved the release date of the film three times before finally dumping it in October of this year. The results I think speak for themselves. This is the kind of disaster that Hollywood lore is built on. It's in every way indicative of the kind of over control and over correction that destroys a film's chance of ever having success. Surprisingly overseas the film has done just fine, making about $50M so far but with such an inflated budget it will have a much bigger hurdle to cover than the initial film's budget. WB trusted the wrong person and in trying to fix it made a bigger disaster than they ever should have had in the first place. Let this be a lesson folks, sometimes something can't be fixed and it's better to take the small beating than waste your time training for a fight you'll never win.

• This week saw five new wide releases and shockingly 4 out of the 5 scored below 20% on Rotten Tomatoes. Because of that it might be a wee bit depressing to some that Only The Brave the only film not only to buck that trend this weekend but actually score an impressive 90% on the site only managed to open at #5 with $6M. There could be a lot of reasons why a film with such a big cast, good reviews, and an A on Cinemascore failed but I think Sony just suffered the worst possible timing. The film is based on the Granite Mountain Hotshots, a group of firefighters who lost their lives fighting a wildfire in Arizona in 2013. The release is coming on the heels of the Northern California Fire, the deadliest US wildfire in almost 100 years. Not only that the months prior saw massive wildfires in Oregon, Montana, and Southern California. Simply put I think Sony was terrified of the prospect of putting up billboards full of images of fire that would then be photographed near a real wildfire, terrified this whole summer that they would be viewed as trying to capitalize on current real life tragedy by reliving recent ones. Remember how many people felt Patriots Day was inappropriate for making a film about the Boston Bombings so soon after they happened? Now imagine it had come out after 3 months of constant bombings and you get the picture. I think Sony felt the $35M budget that now won't be covered by the domestic box office is a fine loss as they avoided a PR nightmare, the collateral damage being a very well reviewed film left to die without any support from its studio.

• Look I may have predicted Geostorm would be a flop but that was a softball. Now if someone predicted that not only would The Snowman open to a miserable #8 with $3.4M but that that it would somehow get worse reviews than Geostorm, well they deserve a medal. On paper The Snowman sounds like a sure fire October hit, a month that's been very rewarding to gritty crime thrillers like Gone Girl and Girl on the Train. Not to mention the pedigree of this film was huge including director Tomas Alfredson (director of Let The Right One In and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy), starring Michael Fassbinder, based on a popular detective novel series, and original intended to be directed by Martin Scorsese who remained as producer and even brought over his longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker. The results more than failed that legacy as the film currently stands with a 9% on RT and a horrible D rating on Cinemascore. Surprisingly it was Alfredson himself who gave us all the clues about the troubled production, as apparently when Scorsese left as director it was rushed into production and he was only able to shoot 80%-85% of the total script. The marketing also did the film no favors, focusing bizarrely on these letters the film's killer writes to the police that aren't even featured in the final cut of the film itself. The Snowman is a weird kind of failure, one where so many creative people were around that maybe no one could see or fight for the fact the film was broken and would never be fixed.

• It seems that if the film's title isn't God's Not Dead __ than Pure Flix's new film is just guaranteed to flop as their high profile release Same Kind of Different as Me opened to a miserable #12 with $2.5M. The was clearly an attempt by the company to branch out a little farther into the mainstream by featuring a cast of names including Greg Kinnear, Renee Zellweger, Djimon Hounsou, and Jon Voight. The results however weren't rewarding with a per theater average below $2,000 and a big drop-off from Friday to Saturday. Hopes were high as group church sales were strong but there was just no interest in Pure Flix's attempt to be the next Heaven is For Real of The Shack.

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	$412,501,742	$821,601,742	$149M	21
Cars 3	$152,835,233	$378,235,233	$175M	19
Baby Driver	$107,825,862	$226,695,166	$34M	17
Spider-man: Homecoming	$333,616,415	$879,686,999	$175M	16
Dunkirk	$187,630,833	$523,730,833	$100M	14
IT	$320,234,616	$651,634,616	$35M	7

Notable Film Closings

Title	Domestic Gross	Worldwide Gross	Budget
47 Meters Down	$44,307,193	$53,908,225	$5.5M
The Big Sick	$42,872,467	$52,979,324	$5M

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 23, 2017 at 09:30PM by mi-16evil http://ift.tt/2it3BJX