Maybe it was the glowing reviews and overwhelming buzz––or maybe it was just because this was one of the slimmest weeks of the year, release-wise––but, somehow, Nightcrawler took the No. 1 spot at the weekend box office. Dan Gilroy’s modestly budgeted debut feature––which is about the cutthroat world of freelance journalism, but without the parts where you send increasingly passive-aggressive invoices for payment––grossed $10.9 million, very narrowly beating out last week’s Ouija and briefly sending America back to the 1970s, when a dollar was worth something, you could smoke everywhere, and R-rated grown-up-type movies could hit the top spot at the box office without being adapted from a popular novel. (Did you know Manhattan was No. 1 for three weeks?)
Meanwhile, David Ayer’s Peckinpah-esque Fury, which opened at No. 1 two weeks ago, took the No. 3 spot with another $9.1 million, rolling its total over the $60 million mark. In its fifth week of release, Gone Girl earned another $8.8 million, landing in the No. 5 spot. Surprise critics’ darling John Wick has continued to modestly outperform expectations, earning another $8 million.
Aside from Nightcrawler, all of the week’s other new releases tanked. The amnesia thriller Before I Go To Sleep earned $2 million, despite opening on almost 2,000 screens, making it the worst opening of star Nicole Kidman’s career. The Joe Hill adaptation Horns––which stars Daniel Radcliffe as someone who sounds an awful lot like Aaron Paul––grossed $104,000 in 103 theaters, while the oil spill doc The Great Invisible made $1,900 on its way to being recommended to you by a wonky Netflix algorithm six months from now.
No release, however, flopped as spectacularly as the 10th anniversary re-release of Saw. Dispatched to over 2,000 theaters, it earned just $650,000––about $315 per screen––over the Halloween weekend, suggesting that viewers have outgrown torture porn and moved on to more grown-up fears, like board games and the 24-hour news cycle. In other news, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has somehow grossed $434.5 million.
For more detailed numbers, visit Box Office Mojo.