THB #706: Box Office Quickie

Yet another weekend in which I feel compelled to write a little about box office when I didn’t expect to do so. Oddly, I feel like next weekend’s powerhouse of Lilo, Stitch, and Tom will not require me to say too much at all.

But…

”There is a shot at $50M, however, as we all know, horror films are frontloaded. But this has a B+ CinemaScore, high praise for a horror film.”

If you are a regular reader, you are already parsing this mess.

First, the definition of “horror film” has become beyond sloppy. Final Destination is and has been since the first one in 1991, a series of filmic Rube Goldberg devices leading, almost invariably, to graphic deaths. But it’s really a thriller, with the never-seen character of “death” and the idea that death is pre-ordained and once it is, “it” will keep coming until it gets everyone who “it meant” to kill. Admittedly, there is a supernatural element… but the gimmick has no traditional horror threat… or even an nontraditional one like It Follows.

Rube anticipated selfies long before cell phone cameras

Each film starts with the hero character imagining a massive horror that is about to befall their friends and a lot of other people in a public space.

In the first film, a teen boy, traveling with a group, senses that death will come if they get on a plane. He imagines the plane exploding in a dream and when he wakes, freaks out, and gets his whole group thrown off the flight. And sure enough, the plane explodes. Now all of them are marked for death.