'Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin'
In what was a comparatively ignoble end to an otherwise vibrant October at the domestic box office, Dune dropped 62% and still topped the charts with $15.53 million. The biggest new release was My Hero Academia: World Heroes Mission which earned a whopping $6.4 million, followed by (among newbies) Last Night In Soho with $4.2 million, Antlers with $4.1 million and the wide release $2.9 million debut of The French Dispatch. Dune’s return trip atop the domestic box office was as much a matter of scheduling. No, not just that Paramount’s
Paranormal Activity began as a $15,000 horror movie helmed by Oren Peli which centered on a young couple being menaced by unseen forces, with Micah and Kate’s at-home recording devices capturing at least some of the peril as the danger increases. It was a hell of a gimmick, and early interest by then-unknown Jason Blum (who came aboard as a producer) led to interest from DreamWorks and Steven Spielberg himself. Thanks partially to a brilliant “demand this movie play at your local theater” marketing campaign which made the otherwise standard slow-roll platform release feel like a word-of-mouth event, Paranormal Activity exploded onto the scene in Fall 2009. It expanded to 160 theaters in weekend three where it earned a jaw-dropping $7.9 million.
That’s the weekend I saw it amid a packed crowd of jazzed horror fans. I’m not going to pretend than I loved the movie, but I had a blast watching the rest of the audience go wild on cue. That was a big appeal, at least for me, in seeing these films in theaters. Nonetheless, it earned $19.6 million the next weekend in 700 theaters and went wide on the opening weekend of Saw VI, as the former king of Halloween for five previous seasons got shellacked by the newbie. Saw VI, the best film in the franchise, opened with just $14 million while Paranormal Activity nabbed another $21 million on the way to a $108 million domestic/$193.5 million global cume. The king was dead, long live the new king.
Even taking into account the over/under $200,000 spent on reshoots and tinkering, Paranormal Activity still stands as essentially the most profitable (in terms of rate-of-return) movie ever made. Sequels were an obvious consequence, although the delightful Paramount+ documentary Unknown Dimensions is amusingly honest about the challenges of making a sequel to such a lightning-in-a-bottle smash. Paranormal Activity 2 got a wide release and an IMAX engagement in October 2010, where it earned a $40.6 million opening weekend toward a $177 million worldwide cume. Paranormal Activity 3 followed in 2011. The prequel installment opened with $53 million (second only to Hannibal’ s $58 million debut in 2001 among R-rated horror flicks at the time) and earned $207 million on a $5 million budget.
Like the Saw series before it, the franchise arguably peaked in terms of popularity and pop culture buzz with those first three films. Paranormal Activity 4, starring newbie Katherine Newton, was amusingly the first present-tense sequel to the first film. Paranormal Activity 2 was a Saw IV-style side-quel taking place concurrently with the events of the previous entry. It opened with $29 million and earned $143 million on a $5 million budget. Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones was sold as a Hispanic-centric spin-off but was as much a sequel as any of them, earned $91 million off an $18 million debut from a $5 million budget. Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension, billed as a quasi-finale, essentially bombed with $78 million on a $10 million budget in late 2015.
First, earning 7.8 times your budget is usually pretty decent, expectations notwithstanding (even Saw VI earned $68 million on an $11 million budget). Second, and this is key in terms of opening weekend speculation for Next Of Kin, The Ghost Dimension was among two films selected by Paramount in late 2015 (alongside Christopher Landon’s A Scout’s Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse) as test subjects in a theoretical attempt to shrink the theatrical window. The plan was for both low-budget (and thus low-risk) horror films to go to VOD 17 days after they dipped below 300 theaters. AMC and Cineplex agreed to the plan, which would have seen them receive around 4% of the digital, but Regal, Cinemark and Carmike said “No.”
As such, the film got blackballed by around half of its theoretical domestic theatrical marketplace, opening with $8 million in 1,656 theaters versus $18 million in 2,883 theaters for the (Chris Landon-directed) Marked Ones. I don’t know why this didn’t come up in the Paramount+ documentary as a reason for Paranormal Activity 6’s theatrical fate, but Ghost Dimension’s per-theater average ($4,873) wasn’t that far off from the $6,398 per-theater earned by The Marked Ones in 2014. Does that mean that the sixth installment would have performed akin to the fifth one in conventional domestic circumstances? Probably not, but I’d imagine the drop would have been less severe, and there would have been less of a feeling that the franchise was deader than dead.
As such, it wouldn’t be total insanity to wonder out loud whether Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin, which was intended to be a theatrical release in the before-times, might have been able to open just high enough take the top spot from Dune this weekend. The film arguably cheats in terms of the found footage gimmick, but it looks surprisingly sharp for a Paranormal Activity film and uses its “terror in an Amish community” setting for some visual variation. It’s less a Paranormal Activity movie and more “What if Midsummer but Paranormal Activity?” genre appropriation that I can at least somewhat support. It honestly treads water for the first hour before, like director William Eubank’s Underwater, tripling down in the comparatively big-scale and fantastical final 30 minutes.
We don’t yet know if anyone watched the seventh installment in the now-13-year-old haunted house/found footage franchise (which has earned $890.4 million on a combined $28.5 million budget). I cannot say whether the loose reboot, a film with no explicit connections to the prior six films (and its comparatively convoluted time-hopping continuity), would have played to halfway decent theatrical business had it opened over Halloween weekend. If it had played essentially like a late-in-game Paranormal Activity movie, it likely would have topped the domestic box office by default. Whether that designation would have been worth it for Paramount, weighing the expense of opening a film in wide release alongside the low cost/low-return variable of releasing a film like that to their streaming platform, well, that’s the question of the moment for an industry at a crossroad.
One big hook of these R-rated but not gore-drenched movies was not just in watching the films but watching the four-quadrant audience get played like a piano. It was typical of Paramount at its peak, knocking out game-changing tentpoles (Transformers, Iron Man, Star Trek, World War Z, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) and turning smaller films (Paranormal Activity, Jackass 3-D, Super 8, etc.) into theatrical winners. It’s ironic that Paramount understandably closed the book on Paranormal Activity right before the bottom fell out on old-school, star-driven studio programmers (concurrently with most of Paramount’s best IP, like DreamWorks SKG and the MCU) finding new homes and becoming competition. Ten years ago, Paramount ruled the Halloween box office with an iron first. This year, they didn’t even bother to compete.
