If we’ve learned anything about cinematic evil spirits over the years, it’s that they’re all kinda grabby. Like petulant toddlers, they like to take things from their harried mortal prey—be it their happiness or well-being or, very often, their very souls. You might say they’re rather (ahem) possessive. So perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that moviedom’s latest evil spirit found a way to possess the top of the box office.
The Possession snuck into theaters during the typically sleepy Labor Day weekend and gobbled up $21.3 million during the extended four-day tally ($17.7 million if you don’t count Monday’s totals). That was more than adequate to pack away the box office crown in the film’s creepy little box. Sure, $21.3 million might not sound like a ton of coin, but for a Labor Day weekend it was frighteningly good. In fact, The Possession scored the second best Labor Day haul in history, trailing only 2007’s Halloween reboot.
Lawless, another new release, finished second with $13 million over the extended weekend. It outmuscled two-time champs The Expendables 2 for the runner-up spot, which meant that Stallone and Co. had to be satisfied with $11.2 million and a third-place finish.
The Bourne Legacy ($9.4 million) and ParaNorman ($8.9 million) finished fourth and fifth, respectively. And the cinematic life of The Odd Life of Timothy Green is growing a wee bit odder. Disney’s sweet fable finished sixth with $8.5 million—nearly 20% more than it earned last weekend. Granted, that includes an extra day, but no holdover—excepting The Avengers, which was re-released into more than 1,500 theaters this weekend—boasted that kind of staying power.
Alas, another big-screen fable—one far more saccharine—set itself up to be the biggest bomb of the year. Oogieloves In The Big Balloon Adventure, a $20 million flick aimed at the preschool set, made $601,000 over the holiday weekend—besting some movie called The Intouchables for 26th place. And if we were examining just Friday-through-Sunday, things would look even worse. According to the Los Angeles Times, the $445,000 Oogieloves made during the traditional three-day weekend frame gives it the worst wide-release opening in history.
Now, a $600,000 opening weekend might be just fine for your standard direct-to-DVD release, but Oogieloves was released on more than 2,100 screens, which means that the average per-screen take was, oh, about $278. For comparison’s sake, The Possession averaged $7,600 per screen, and Brave—which has been out for a whopping three months and is still 16th—still earned more than $1,700 per screen. Clearly, there was little love for these Oogies.
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