1/15/2024 0 Comments Movie times paranormal activity 4Just as Paramount starts bagging this weekend’s windfall from “Paranormal Activity 4,” the studio will begin production on a spinoff from the series, “The Oxnard Tapes.” That film will be cast with Latino actors and aimed even more directly at that audience, although the spinoff will be largely in English. Made on shoestring budgets (the first film, released theatrically in 2009, cost about $15,000, while Friday’s latest sequel was budgeted just more than $6 million), the “Paranormal” films so far have averaged just under $100 million in domestic release and have proved equally popular overseas, which is rare for horror films. The three preceding “Paranormal Activity” films, each of which offer twists on the found-footage style of horror storytelling, have delivered some of the best returns on investment in modern Hollywood history. In international territories, the franchise has performed especially well in Spanish-speaking countries. The Latino audience has seen the three previous “Paranormal Activity” films in disproportionate numbers compared with the national population. This year, they didn’t even bother to compete.Paramount Pictures’ wildly successful horror movie franchise “Paranormal Activity” gets a fourth supernatural spin this weekend, and if it follows the pattern of the earlier films the box office will be bolstered by Latino moviegoers. Ten years ago, Paramount ruled the Halloween box office with an iron first. It’s ironic that Paramount understandably closed the book on Paranormal Activity right before the bottom fell out on old-school, star-driven studio programmers (concurrently with most of Paramount’s best IP, like DreamWorks SKG and the MCU) finding new homes and becoming competition. It was typical of Paramount at its peak, knocking out game-changing tentpoles ( Transformers, Iron Man, Star Trek, World War Z, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) and turning smaller films ( Paranormal Activity, Jackass 3-D, Super 8, etc.) into theatrical winners. One big hook of these R-rated but not gore-drenched movies was not just in watching the films but watching the four-quadrant audience get played like a piano. Whether that designation would have been worth it for Paramount, weighing the expense of opening a film in wide release alongside the low cost/low-return variable of releasing a film like that to their streaming platform, well, that’s the question of the moment for an industry at a crossroad. If it had played essentially like a late-in-game Paranormal Activity movie, it likely would have topped the domestic box office by default. I cannot say whether the loose reboot, a film with no explicit connections to the prior six films (and its comparatively convoluted time-hopping continuity), would have played to halfway decent theatrical business had it opened over Halloween weekend. We don’t yet know if anyone watched the seventh installment in the now-13-year-old haunted house/found footage franchise (which has earned $890.4 million on a combined $28.5 million budget). It honestly treads water for the first hour before, like director William Eubank’s Underwater, tripling down in the comparatively big-scale and fantastical final 30 minutes. It’s less a Paranormal Activity movie and more “What if Midsummer but Paranormal Activity?” genre appropriation that I can at least somewhat support. The film arguably cheats in terms of the found footage gimmick, but it looks surprisingly sharp for a Paranormal Activity film and uses its “terror in an Amish community” setting for some visual variation. Does that mean that the sixth installment would have performed akin to the fifth one in conventional domestic circumstances? Probably not, but I’d imagine the drop would have been less severe, and there would have been less of a feeling that the franchise was deader than dead.Īs such, it wouldn’t be total insanity to wonder out loud whether Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin, which was intended to be a theatrical release in the before-times, might have been able to open just high enough take the top spot from Dune this weekend. I don’t know why this didn’t come up in the Paramount+ documentary as a reason for Paranormal Activity 6’s theatrical fate, but Ghost Dimension’s per-theater average ($4,873) wasn’t that far off from the $6,398 per-theater earned by The Marked Ones in 2014. As such, the film got blackballed by around half of its theoretical domestic theatrical marketplace, opening with $8 million in 1,656 theaters versus $18 million in 2,883 theaters for the (Chris Landon-directed) Marked Ones.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |