Yes, the summer season is officially over, because horror films are once again taking over the box office. This weekend saw the rather intelligent courtroom-horror The Exorcism Of Emily Rose storm to the top of the US box office with $30.2 million – about twice what analysts had estimated for its opening take.
The film is loosely based on a true story, and tells the story of a young girl who is apparently possessed, and dies in the course of an exorcism. The priest responsible is then tried for manslaughter, setting the scene for a sort of trial of exorcism. The film becomes the third-biggest ever opening for September, and pushed the box office ahead of the equivalent weekend last year.
In second place was The 40 Year Old Virgin, still hanging on with $7.9 million in its fourth week (a 40% drop), and $82.3 million overall. That's not quite as huge as Wedding Crashers (still in 8th place, incidentally, with a mere 32% drop on last week), but it's still darn healthy. The Transporter 2 fell a steeper 56% to $7.2 million in its second week for $30.1 million so far and third place.
The Constant Gardener is also doing well, with $4.9 million in its second weekend, and Red Eye landed in fifth place with $4.6 million and $51.3 million in four weeks.
Another new film, Samuel L. Jackson and Eugene Levy's The Man stumbled into sixth place with $4 million on over 2,000 screens, a disappointing result attributed mainly to the fact that the ads looked pretty unfunny. Much further down, Lasse Hallstrom's An Unfinished Life opened on a tiny 139 screens to $1 million and 15th place, while Lexi Alexander's Green Street (apparently called Green Street Hooligans Stateside, neatly combining two titles) took $60,200 on just 7 screens. Watch out for both of those as they open wider next week.
As always, for more statistics go to Box Office Mojo.