Halloween weekend (observed) was another dismal one for the U.S. domestic box office, falling an alarming 25 percent from the week before for one of the worst weekends in an already terrible year. A clearly puzzled Box Office Mojo attributes the fall to Netflix’s Stranger Things dampening the desire of horror fans to go out to the movies generally, and to see Saw seven-quel Jigsaw specifically. There may be something to that, although it’ll have to stay in the realm of speculation given Netflix’s policy of never revealing internal ratings numbers. But while prognosticators struggle to understand why Jigsaw fell short of expectations—even though it came in at No. 1 and made $16.25 million on a $10 million budget, plus an additional $9 million internationally, it couldn’t touch the big openings of the series’ earlier sequels—we’d like to offer up a far simpler explanation: Maybe people would go to the movies on Halloween weekend if there were any good horror movies out.
Three of this week’s top five are all horror, or at least horror-adjacent: Just after the so-so Jigsaw, Tyler Perry’s Boo 2! A Madea Halloween came in at No. 2, adding an additional $10 million to its haul, now totaling more than $35 million. That’s “well behind the first film,” as Box Office Mojo notes. The second film is also even more unpopular than the first with critics, coming in at 7 percent to the original Boo! A Madea Halloween’s 21 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Fool me once, get a sequel; fool me twice, fail to meet box-office expectations. That’s how the old phrase goes, right?