October 30, 2012 by Vinnie Leduc
As people prepared for Superstorm Sandy to slam into the East Coast, the box office standings seemed to shuffle chaotically. For Ben Affleck’s Oscar-buzzy Argo, third time’s the charm as the historical thriller became the first movie since True Grit to climb to the top of the domestic box office in its third weekend of release. After holding onto second place last week after opening there the previous week, Argo fended off four new releases, all of which are more or less on the road to flop city.
Superstorm Sandy reportedly didn’t have much effect on the domestic box office, but on Sunday afternoon at Times Square I was denied tickets to Cloud Atlas, the new Wachowski brothers siblings film that opened in second place. It barely scraped by Hotel Transylvania, Adam Sandler’s computer animated family film that sunk its fangs into the biggest September opening ever last month and moved up a place from last weekend.
Paranormal Activity 4, last week‘s champ, dropped to fourth place, less than half a million dollars ahead of newcomer Silent Hill: Revelation, which rounded out the top five but couldn’t take advantage of the last weekend before Halloween. Teen comedy Fun Size squeezed into the top ten in its opening, but it wasn’t as weak as that of Chasing Mavericks, which debuted at 13th.
Here were the top five via BOM:
- Argo — Weekend Gross: $12.1 million — Total Gross: $60.5 million (#2 last week)
- Cloud Atlas — Weekend Gross: $9.6 million — Total Gross: $9.6 million (new)
- Hotel Transylvania — Weekend Gross: $9.4 million — Total Gross: $130.4 million (#4 last week)
- Paranormal Activity 4 — Weekend Gross: $8.5 million — Total Gross: $42.3 million (#1 last week)
- Silent Hill: Revelation — Weekend Gross: $8 million — Total Gross: $8 million (new)
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