‘Madea Halloween’ scares up win
Tyler Perry bested Tom Cruise at the box office this weekend.
Perry’s “Boo! A Madea Halloween” opened in the top spot with an estimated $27.6 million, edging Cruise’s “Jack Reacher: Never Go Back” into second place, according to studio estimates yesterday.
It’s the third-best opening for a “Madea” movie, behind “Madea Goes to Jail” and “Madea’s Family Reunion,” and a sign of the character’s longstanding appeal to audiences.
To market the film, which reportedly cost $20 million to produce, Lionsgate leveraged the social media audiences of Perry and his cast as well as promotional videos such as one featuring Jimmy Fallon as Trump alongside Madea that ended up going viral.
“Tyler Perry is a movie star. Tyler Perry is a mogul. The Madea character has provided box-office dividends for years. It’s a perfect combination, Madea and Halloween right before Halloween,” said comScore senior media analyst Paul Dergarabedian.
That timing, along with the promising A CinemaScore, should bode well for the film’s second weekend over Halloween.
“A Madea Halloween” proved to be the strongest of the slew of sequels this weekend, topping even the star power of Tom Cruise, whose “Jack Reacher: Never Go Back” took in $23 million for Paramount Pictures.
It’s a far cry from Cruise’s successes with the “Mission: Impossible” movies for Paramount, but it did do significantly better than the first “Jack Reacher,” which opened right before Christmas in 2012 to $15.2 million. That film went on to gross $80.1 million domestically and $218.3 globally. The sequel, directed by Edward Zwick and costing $60 million, will also likely be making the bulk of its money from international audiences.
Coming in third this weekend was the horror prequel “Ouija: Origin of Evil” with $14.1 million — just the latest in a string of highly fruitful and modestly budgeted horror films this year, including “The Conjuring 2,” “Don’t Breathe” and “Light’s Out.”
Holdovers “The Accountant” and “The Girl on the Train” rounded out the top five with $14 million and $7.3 million.
Less successful was 20th Century Fox’s comedy “Keeping Up with the Joneses,” which launched with a tepid $5.6 million. The film, starring Isla Fisher and Zack Galifianakis as a pair of boring suburbanites intrigued by the arrival of a glamourous couple played by Jon Hamm and Gal Gadot, was savaged by critics.