I was apprehensive about the whole DEMAND IT marketing campaign for Oren Peli’s PARANORMAL ACTIVITY (a little too gimmicky for me), but after a phenomenal weekend at the box office and more than 1M demands, it looks like the film is going to be released nationwide over the next few weekends. Bravo!
This past weekend Paramount decided to give it a chance and released it in all the major cities across the U.S. on 140 screens, and wouldn’t you know it, the film managed to rake in a whopping $7.1M over the weekend, cracking the number 5 spot at this weekend’s box office! Wow!
Doing the math, that’s about a $44,000 per-screen-average, versus the top spot of COUPLE’S RETREAT, which had an per-screen-average of around $11,000 on about 3,000 screens. So really, while it didn’t take the overall number one spot, it certainly took the number one per-screen-average, and that alone is saying something! Especially considering it only cost about $10,000 to make!
PARANORMAL ACTIVITY certainly is the little movie that could, and I can only imagine the whopping numbers it’s going to do when it expands to more and more theaters as we inch closer and closer to Halloween. And the best part of all? The film actually lives up to the hype of being genuinely creepy, producing a decent amount of scares throughout.
Keep your eye on your local theaters to see whether PARANORMAL ACTICITY expands to your town this weekend, and give it a round of applause for kicking so much ass at the box office over the weekend. For a movie released on under 200 screens to crack the top 5 is impressive by any standard, especially for a little horror movie like this.