Weekend Box Office: “Hotel Transylvania” and “Looper” exceed expectations

After many straight weekends of disappointments at the domestic box office, Hollywood finally got to jump for joy again… well, at least Sony, which released both the #1 and #2 grossing movies, did. Those movies were the animated family comedy “Hotel Transylvania” and the high-concept sci-fi film “Looper,” which sold an estimated $43 million and $21.2 million worth of tickets, respectively. Provided Disney’s similarly targeted black-and-white 3-D gamble “Frankenweenie” doesn’t get in the way (it shouldn’t), the former film should play pretty well through Halloween, even though this critic loathed it and thinks that word-of-mouth will be subpar. The latter film, on the other hand, should generate spectacular word-of-mouth, as evidenced by James Frazier’s straight “A” review. “Hotel Transylvania” and “Looper” appear to be on their ways to $140 million and $55 million totals, respectively… Not too shabby.

Another big surprise was Universal’s musical-comedy “Pitch Perfect,” which scored sixth place and $5.2 million from a meager 335 theaters, in a special early release designed to generate word-of-mouth for next weekend’s wide launch. The studio couldn’t have hoped for any more than half that, so the unorthodox distribution pattern seems to already be working. $15 million next weekend isn’t out of the question; in fact, there’s even a small chance that the pic could do $20 million.

Check out the full top 10 chart below…

No.	Title	Weekend	Per Theater Average	Total
1	“Hotel Transylvania”	$43.0M	$12,840	$43.0M
1	“Looper”	$21.2M	$7,086	$21.2M
3	“End of Watch”	$8.0M	$2,878	$26.2M
4	“Trouble with the Curve”	$7.5M	$2,344	$23.7M
5	“House at the End of the Street”	$7.2M	$2,320	$22.2M
6	“Pitch Perfect”	$5.2M	$15,522	$5.2M
7	“Finding Nemo 3-D”	$4.1M	$1,541	$36.5M
8	“Resident Evil: Retribution”	$3.0M	$1,260	$38.7M
9	“The Master”	$2.7M	$3,207	$9.6M
10	“Won’t Back Down”	$2.7M	$1,074	$2.7M

Source: Box Office Mojo