It should be like printing money for horror movies to come out on Halloween weekend, but for the long-delayed Amityville: The Awakening it turned out to be a horror story of a different kind. The Weinstein Company release opened in 10 theaters and earned just $742, for an average of $74.
A lot of sites are actually trying to connect the disastrous opening to the Harvey Weinstein scandal, but it probably has nothing to do with it. The bigger issues were the multiple delays and zero marketing it received. The film, which is yet another sequel to the classic 1979 film The Amityville Horror, stars Bella Thorne and Jennifer Jason Leigh. It was originally a totally different movie, titled Amityville: The Lost Tapes, and would have come out in 2012 (!!!), but was ultimately scrapped with a completely new story written. Director Franck Khalfoun stuck around to direct the new project, which shot in 2014 was due to be released in 2015 (!!!) but was delayed multiple times over the next few years.
Just two weeks ago Weinstein made the film available for FREE on Google Play up until November 8th. Gee, I wonder why nobody paid for it then??? It opened in theaters for only a single night, October 28th, so it won't be making anymore loot until it hits home release in a few days.
Interestingly, I guess, is that Bella Thorne will now have two horrors this season opening for a single night, the other being Keep Watching, which has 10pm showings on Halloween only.
There are a couple of plus sides to this. One is that Amityville: The Awakening opened overseas in July and has made $7.2M. The other is that this may finally bring the Amityville curse to an end.
