![]() 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. 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. 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. ![]() If it had played essentially like a late-in-game Paranormal Activity movie, it likely would have topped the domestic box office by default. ![]() 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. 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). 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. It’s less a Paranormal Activity movie and more “What if Midsummer but Paranormal Activity?” genre appropriation that I can at least somewhat support. 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. 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.Īs 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. 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. 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.
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