Straw Dogs Fails to Make Hay at the Box Office
Steve Barton
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Box Office Mojo
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It’s been such a bad couple of weeks for the horror genre that even movies that aren’t really horror movies being marketed as if they were horror movies can’t cut it at the box office. Somewhere in heaven Sam Peckinpah is having a good laugh at Rod Lurie’s expense.
It would seem the only animal audiences were interested in this weekend was a 3D animated lion, certainly not any dogs. Rod Lurie’s remake of Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs got taken out back like Old Yeller, pulling in a measly $5 million for a fifth place finish, according to BoxOfficeMojo. Maybe they should have tried marketing the movie as a violent but sophisticated thriller geared toward adult audiences and not as a gritty horror movie in the vein of Last House on the Left or The Strangers. Maybe they should have just not remade Straw Dogs, period.
Steven Soderbergh’s star-studded pandemic chiller Contagion fell to #2 with another $14.5 million. That brings its 10-day total to $44.2 million.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes will probably finally fall out of the top ten next week as it dropped to 9th place with a $2.6 million weekend. It’s looking like it will end up finishing its theatrical run somewhere in the neighborhood of $175 million domestically, which is pretty damn impressive for a movie few people were even giving a second thought to up until the week that it opened.
Shark Night 3D and Apollo 18 both fell completely out of the top ten, ending up in 11th and 18th place, respectively. Add them to the past month and a half’s pile of horrific box office disappointments.
As for last weekend’s record-shattering financial fiasco Creature, who the hell even knows? I’m under the impression that most of the 1,507 theaters screening dumped it after nobody – AND I MEAN NOBODY!!! – showed up to see it during the first seven days and there are no numbers detailing how far it this weekend dropped from its cataclysmic $300,000 opening.
The horror genre takes next week off but comes back at the end of the month when Mr. & Mrs. James Bond buy a Dream House. It remains to be seen whether audiences will show up for this open house. Actually, it remains to be seen if there will even be a point in doing so since the trailer looks to spoil the majority of the movie.
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