NEW YORK – In a scary close finish, the Jake Gyllenhaal crime thriller Nightcrawler and the board-game adaptation Ouija tied for first at the box office with $10.9 million each over the Halloween weekend.
That was according to estimates Sunday from each film’s distributor. Studios can predict a film’s Sunday performance with fairly accurate precision. When final figures are announced Monday, one film will likely slightly edge out the other.
For the low-budget Los Angeles noir Nightcrawler, it was a strong debut considering its creepy, unconventional protagonist. Gyllenhaal plays an ambulance-chasing man who shoots gory footage for the local news.
READ MORE: What the critics are saying about Nightcrawler
The independent film was able to capitalize on a weekend the studios were frightened away from. With Halloween falling on a Friday, trick-or-treating cannibalized one of the most lucrative moviegoing nights of the week. Grosses were down 40 per cent Friday from the same weekend a year ago, according to box-office tracker Rentrak.
Despite the Halloween night impact, Ouija dropped only 45 per cent after topping the box office last weekend. That’s unusually low for a micro-budget horror film, most of which see interest wane considerably after opening.
The close contest added drama to one of the quietest movie weekends of the year. Overall business was down 25 per cent from the prior year.
Next weekend will be a far different story, though, with the highly anticipated release of Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi epic Interstellar, as well as the animated superhero film Big Hero 6.
In the meantime, the Brad Pitt World War II tale Fury held in third place with $9.1 million in its third week of release. In its fifth week, the Ben Affleck thriller Gone Girl also remained in fourth with an additional $8.8 million to its $136.6 million cumulative total to make it the highest grossing release of director David Fincher’s career.
The Book of Life earned $8.3 million to take fifth spot.
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