Halloween is arriving a week early for moviegoers this year, and it looks like this year's movies are attending the weekend box office costume party as David and Goliath. Going as Goliath is ""Saw VI,"" another installment in the unstoppable torture-porn franchise. With a relatively cheap budget of $10 million and a built-in audience that can't wait to see more Jigsaw action, ""Saw VI"" has everything going for it.
But don't count on ""Paranormal Activity"" lying down without a fight. The movie has been expertly handled by Paramount and has exceeded expectations by relying on a word-of-mouth campaign that has built expectations to unbelievably high heights. With a budget of only $15,000 and an initial release of fewer than a dozen theaters, ""Paranormal Activity"" has been grossing an exceptionally high amount per theater. Last week it finished third at the box office with $19.6 million in only 763 theaters. With almost 2,000 screens playing the film by Friday, David could easily knock Goliath out cold.
""Paranormal Activity"" has been billed as the next ""Blair Witch Project,"" and the comparisons are pretty fair. The film is shot in a documentary style, and, much like ""Blair Witch,"" the scariest moments occur off-camera, leaving viewers to piece together the grisly occurrences in their own mind. ""The Blair Witch Project"" managed to gross a little under $250 million worldwide on an initial budget of $20,000 (though postproduction reshoots and sound mixes by the studio left the budget at about $750,000). Perhaps ""Paranormal Activity"" won't have the classic ""I'm so scared"" catchphrase that kept ""The Blair Witch Project"" on the pop-culture forefront for so long, but it will almost certainly be this year's biggest horror film, both in terms of quality and box-office mastery.
Experts are already predicting a sizable international audience for ""Paranormal Activity,"" as they are usually receptive to the top U.S. films of the year. It's very unlikely ""Saw VI"" will find that audience, as the ""torture porn"" genre that the original ""Saw"" helped pioneer is much less popular overseas, making it an almost exclusively American venture.
In keeping with the low-profile, word-of-mouth marketing strategy, the stars of ""Paranormal Activity"" (Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat) have given very few interviews. Paramount may want to give the film a slightly bigger marketing campaign to push it over the top in the coming weeks, but for now, as the old saying goes, less has been more. Audiences prefer to think of the film as a hidden gem they've found rather than a mass-produced megaplex release. ""Saw VI"" doesn't have any of that underground, indie credibility, especially given that it has reached its sixth installment.
Despite ""Saw VI"" holding all the foreseeable advantages in this weekend's box-office battle, it may be ""Paranormal Activity"" standing over the fallen Jigsaw at the weekend's conclusion. Still, as is the case with predicting box-office success, anything can happen.
