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The Conjuring not so scary in Australia

Director James Wan’s supernatural thriller The Conjuring topped the box-office in the US last weekend but had a mediocre launch in Australia, where the genre historically has struggled to attract big audiences.

Frat-boy house party comedy This Is the End enlivened the Australian B.O. but Nicolas Winding Refn’s Thailand-set revenge tale Only God Forgives evidently was too violent for mainstream audiences in Oz and the US.

The Sandra Bullock/Melissa McCarthy comedy The Heat reigned again Down Under, fetching $2.8 million in its second weekend (down 28%), bringing its takings to a juicy $8.3 million.

Audiences sparked to the antics of James Franco, Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill and Jay Baruchel in This is the End, which grabbed $2.46 million plus about $500,000 in paid previews.

The Conjuring, which stars Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga as paranormal experts who investigate a family who are terrorised in their remote Long Island home, drew $1.8 million. The film rang up $US41.9 million in the US, a successful outing for Wan, who directed the first Saw movie and executive-produced the other entries in that franchise.

Before Midnight, the third of director Richard Linklater’s films dealing with the relationship between Ethan Hawke’s Jesse and Julie Delpy’s Celine, rang up $315,000 at 55 screens.

Only God Forgives prompted as many boos as cheers at its Cannes film festival premiere. Ryan Gosling plays a guy who runs a kickboxing gym with his brother (Tom Burke) in Thailand as a front for drug dealing. The actioner took $155,000 on 55 screens in Oz and $315,000 on 78 in the US where it also went out on Video-on-Demand platforms.

The New York Times slammed Refn’s film as “pretentious macho nonsense…. so devoid of emotion that its ritualised gore acts as a narcotic.”

  1. had no idea it’s playing here, for that very reason…genre gets treated so poorly here the distributors have literally chased a huge audience out of the cinema. I’ll make it my business to see it asap

    The Evil Dead remake playing on such a minute number of screens was also a massive blunder.

  2. I would like to say that in Australia ticket prices re ridiculouy expensive and thats why Australia has been a box office deception for quite frankly a lot of movies to hit the screens recently.

  3. Late to this article but it seems like really negative spin.

    The Conjuring took $1.8m which are pretty good numbers for what was seen as a small (under $20m) film. It also had one of the highest screen averages that week and unlike a lot of blockbusters, has stuck around in the Top 10 for quite a while.

    People keep saying the genre underperforms but then they never give it a chance to really do well (witness the Australian releases of Evil Dead and Cabin in the Woods vs their international releases). We even hijack our own contributions to the genre by giving 100 Bloody Acres which had a high 80’s review on Rotten Tomatoes a 4 screen release during Hollywood blockbuster season.

    Wolf Creek was one of the few genre films the distributor has got behind and it performed well with #2 likely to do even better. Maybe we should stop the negative spin as it becomes self fulfilling?

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