The Messengers Spooks Out Weekend Box Office

So do you want the good news or the bad news first? Seeing as how the internet is essentially a one-way medium, we'll give you the good news first - Epic Movie isn't top of the US weekend box office yet; the bad news is that The Messengers is instead.

That means that instead of tired old jokes about Mr Tumnus throwing a bottle at Diddy, The Messengers means that the weekend box office is all about tired old horror films where children walk around a haunted house all spooked out by other children who've been dead for a few years. Basically, The Messengers is just like every other horror film you've ever seen - except for the film where that man drowns in gallons of rotten liquidised pig intestines. Dude, that horror film totally rocked.

But The Messengers doesn't. Just to be clear.

Oxide Pang has a long history of making horror films so scary that you actually get free incontinence pants with every DVD you buy. From The Eye (all about the world's scariest eye) to Re-Cycle (about the world's scariest local council-enforced environmental refuse-collecting scheme), Oxide Pang has shown a keen knowledge about how to spook out an audience. But The Messengers - Pang's first American movie - looks like a bad jumble of haunted house movie, haunted kid movie and haunted hospital blanket movie that only managed to claw a 17% rating on Rottentomatoes. But still, The Messengers is top of the weekend box office, so at least it's statistically better than Factory Girl.

1 - The Messengers (The Messengers is now officially the scariest film named after a crappy free local newspaper since the 1978 slasher-flick The Adscene Holocaust) $14,500,000

2 - Because I Said So (The film where Mandy Moore more or less quotes huge passages from the nearest self-help book and generally makes us wish she was still a vaguely under-performing pop star) $13,022,000

3 - Epic Movie (Ever had a conversation that's gone "You know that bit in Superman Returns where he stops a bullet with his eye? Wouldn't it be funny if it hurt him?" before realising that actually it would be just about the least funny thing ever seen? Yeah, the makers of Epic Movie didn't get that memo) $8,225,000

4 - Night At The Museum (Night At The Museum is now the 54th biggest movie in history. In your face Mrs Doubtfire!) $6,750,000

5 - Smokin' Aces (Smoking Aces is now the 1,820th biggest movie in history. In your face, uh, whatever film it overtook that we can't be bothered to look up) $6,324,000 

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Weekend Box Office - Box Office Mojo