We’re gonna go out on a limb and guess that you didn’t see Amityville: The Awakening in a movie theater this past weekend. We’re pretty sure about that because the Dimension Films and The Weinstein Co. release was only in theaters for one day in ten locations and managed to eke out a mere $742 in that time.
To put that in perspective, that’s $74.20 per theater. The average movie ticket price in the U.S. is around $8.84, which comes out to around eight people per theater and 84 moviegoers total. Probably not what they had in mind when they greenlit the 18th entry (!!) in the Amityville series. It’s also a far cry from The Amityville Horror remake in 2005 that grossed $65 million.
Given that the ill-fated film was delayed four different times (January 2015, April 2016, January 2017, June 2017) and opens with the disgraced Weinstein logo up top, it makes you wonder why they even bothered releasing the film theatrically. That’s especially true when you consider it was released for free on Google Play two weeks ago and will continue to be free on the service through November 8.
Did they really think there were enough people who wanted to pay $8-10 to see a copy of a copy of a copy of a decent horror movie? It’s certainly not because they thought the film would be a critical success as the 20 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes can attest. It also certainly isn’t some kind of crazy attempt to make the film award-eligible because the basic requirement is that a movie runs for a whole week in a Los Angeles-area theater, which it did not.
The only plausible conclusion is that they actually believed the name would be enough to get butts in seats as if the Amityville name carried that kind of weight. While it has its fans, Halloween and Friday the 13th it is not.
And so, Amityville: The Awakening joins the pantheon of “great” films to be among the worst box-office performers of all time. It did slightly worse than United Passions, the FIFA-backed film that grossed just $918 in its opening weekend. To be fair, United Passions had a full weekend to pull in that number. If you just take the opening day numbers, it was $319. So by comparison, perhaps Amityville: The Awakening truly did succeed.
Some other films that join them in the ranks of worst box office take of all time include I Kissed a Vampire ($1,380) Last Flight of the Champion ($1,493) and the infamous Zyzzyx Road, starring Katherine Heigl and Tom Sizemore, which grossed a scant $30 over six days in a Dallas theater.
