The vast majority of moviegoers were focused on The Devil Wears Prada 2 over the weekend, with the long-awaited sequel posting a huge $77 million chart-topping box officee debut. Meanwhile, the Michael Jackson biopic Michael ($54 million) continued its massive run as we head into the summer movie season. However, horror still had its place on a crowded weekend, as two new original titles managed to hold their own against the stiff competition.
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First up was director Damian McCarthy’s latest Hokum. Released by NEON, the haunted hotel horror flick opened to $6.4 million, good enough for number five on the charts. It actually ranks as one of NEON’s biggest opening weekends ever, amazingly enough, trailing Longlegs ($22.4 million), The Monkey ($14 million) and Together ($6.7 million). That’s damn good company to be in. It also helps that the movie was met with a warm reception from both critics and audiences, which should be good for word of mouth.
Then we have Deep Water, the latest shark flick from Deep Blue Sea director Renny Harlin. It opened with $2.1 million at number eight on the charts against minimal marketing. It’s also now the best opening weekend ever for relatively new distributor Magenta Light Studios. It’s almost by default given how few titles the company has released thus far. All the same, a win is a win. It’s the first movie for Harlin since the conclusion of The Strangers trilogy, which ended on a bit of a down note last year.
Hokum centers on novelist Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) who retreats to a remote inn to scatter his parents’ ashes. He is consumed by tales of a witch haunting the honeymoon suite but a strange disappearance forces him to confront dark corners of his past.
Deep Water focuses on a group of international passengers on a flight from Los Angeles to Shanghai who are forced to make an emergency landing in shark-infested waters. Aarron Eckhart (The Dark Knight) and Ben Kingsley (The Thursday Murder Club) lead the cast.
In other news, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy passed the $80 million mark globally, somewhat quietly becoming a solid little hit for Warner Bros. and Blumhouse following the movie’s solid opening weekend in April. That was the most recent “for the masses” horror movie we had, but that’s going to change very soon.
This upcoming weekend sees Mortal Kombat II and its R-rated fatalities hitting theaters. May 15 then brings with it Curry Baker’s much-anticipated Obsession, followed by André Øvredal’s latest Passenger on May 22. It will be a horror-heavy start to the summer, to be certain.
Hokum and Deep Water are in theaters now.
