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At $385.2m, it’s about $70m short of Ridley Scott’s previous best, Gladiator, which it should surpass with a 25 November Chinese release to come. Still on top of the global box office after a month is The Martian, its satisfying nuts-and-bolts narrative and chipper spirit giving it true longevity. The Martian – Guardian video review Guardian Judging by Crimson Peak’s failure last week, it’s not clear where that will come from. Hopefully snapping the viewfinder shut on the Paranormal Activity franchise means closure on found-footage horror – the genre desperately needs new blood. That just emphasises, though, how Blumhouse and distributors Paramount might, by tinkering with the US release window, have missed the chance to go out with a bang (presumably the rationale for the extra spend, but let’s see how the digital release pans out). Globally, it’s actually doing quite capably, with Latin American countries setting a string of Paranormal Activity opening highs: Mexico ($2.7m), Brazil ($1.7m), Colombia (517K), Peru (489K).
#CAR IN THE MOVIE THE LAST WITCH HUNTER SERIES#
The caveat is that the series remains ultra-profitable, and even this final fling – at $10m the most expensive of the lot – is already in the black. Paranormal Activity had been declining as a property anyway, the bare-floorboard minimalism of Oren Peli’s 2009, $15,000-budgeted original gradually watered down by more familiar horror-movie tropes and worldwide grosses dropping by No 5 to under half of the series high point – $207m for No 3. Most major chains refused to carry it, dropping the amount of theatres by 1,200 for the fifth instalment to just 1,600. The sixth and final instalment has just opened at $8.2m in the States, a low point for the franchise – though that figure has been affected by the decision to release the film on VOD after 17 days. If low-budget horror hawkers Blumhouse were hoping for a last hurrah with Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension, it’s not working out to plan. The recently announced XXX sequel is probably his best alternative: the original, with $277.4m worldwide, remains his biggest hit outside F&F, but that was nearly 15 years ago. It might be an inconvenient truth for Diesel that audiences are so used to seeing him in contemporary settings that, unless he can dramatically up the quality of his passion projects, muscle-car cockpits are now the only place from which he can reliably tear up the box office. Pitch Black, which in 2000 encouraged the brooding tyro to flourish inside a tight genre frame, and its second sequel, Riddick, worked better partly because they were much more tightly budgeted ($23m and $38m respectively). Like the latter, The Last Witch Hunter – apparently inspired by Diesel’s own D&D character – is another pricey ($90m) indulgence of the actor’s taste for high fantasy, but there seems to be little broader appetite to follow him into big-canvas imaginative excursions. The gravel-chute-throated bruiser returned to the F&F series after big-budget diversions XXX and The Chronicles of Riddick failed him to secure a higher level of stardom in the mid-noughties. The $10.8m US debut for his new fantasy film The Last Witch Hunter is, even unadjusted for inflation, his second-worst result, just behind 2007 sci-fi film Babylon AD Witch Hunter didn’t do much better overseas, with the top two territories – the UK and Germany – failing to open higher than his last solo lead, 2013’s Riddick. The Fast and Furious franchise has become his fiefdom – but the reality is that he has little firepower as an action star outside of it. The clock is surely running down on the Vin Diesel project.