Halloween Chases Weekend Box Office Around With An Axe

Put yourself in the place of a movie studio's marketing department. You're about to release a movie called Halloween so, by using all your promotional might, you decide to release Halloween at, um, the end of August.

Still, the trick seems to have paid off because Halloween is the top movie at the US weekend box office. Although it's not the Halloween you've probably seen - the one from 1978, or any of the Halloween sequels from 1981, 1982, 1988, 1989, 1995, 1998 or 2002 - but this version of Halloween was directed by Rob Zombie, which means there's more awful music and painfully basic psychology about how Michael Myers got evil because of his rubbish childhood than in any of the other Halloween movies. Perhaps if the Bratz movie had taken the same route it wouldn't have done so terribly at the weekend box office either.

Halloween is the top movie at this week's weekend box office, proving that there's no faster way to the top of the weekend box office than by releasing a schlocky horror remake directed by a hairy goth at the arse-end of summer when all the good films have already come out. And, as is always the case with weekend box office successes, we can expect that Halloween will spark off a raft of cynical knock-offs. Not that it'll be a bad thing, though - we've always wanted to see an opportunistic remake of Leprechaun In The Hood where the Leprechaun explains that he only pulls Ice T's fingers off because he had a shitty childhood and listens to nu-metal a lot. Here's the weekend box office top five…

1 - Halloween (Halloween is a 'reimagining' instead of a sequel, remember. That means we only have a few more years to wait before Rob Zombie churns out a reimagining of Halloween: Season Of The Witch. We just can't wait!) $26,503,000

2 - Superbad (Even though it's been out for three weeks, Superbad still took more than twice as much as Mr Bean's Holiday did on it's opening weekend. If only Mr Bean had more hilarious escapades dealing with vaginal blood, maybe he'd have done a little better) $12,200,000

3 - Balls Of Fury (Now that table tennis has joined dodgeball, ice skating and racecar driving as sports covered by recent comedy movies, it only has to be a matter of time before someone buys our hilarious Foosball-based knockabout Will Ferrell vehicle) $11,604,795

4 - The Bourne Ultimatum (We defy anyone to watch The Bourne Ultimatum and not become so mesmerised with the crooked CIA boss's sideburns that you later have dreams where you're actually swimming in them. No? Just us?) $10,183,000

5 - Rush Hour 3 (Nope, still not funny) $8,560,000

Read more:

Weekend Box Office - Box Office Mojo