Horror Show: North American box office records lowest monthly gross since 1997 | film

October box office receipts collapsed to levels not seen since the late 1990s, with Halloween weekend becoming the worst of the year so far.

According to a report in Variety, total cinema revenues for October in North America were $425m (£323m), the lowest figure since October 1997, when it was $385m – not counting October 2020, when North American cinemas only took in $63m as cinema was severely affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.

A number of factors have been blamed for the poor results. It is worth noting that there was a dearth of supposed hits, with the only wide-release film being Tron: Ares, which grossed $67 million in North America, as part of a disappointing total of $133 million worldwide against its reported budget of $180 million.

So-called “awards season” films also performed disappointingly, with Dwayne Johnson’s wrestling film The Smashing Machine, Julia Roberts’ #MeToo drama After the Hunt, and the music biopic Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere all grossing less than expected.

The end of October usually brings a batch of horror films, but with Halloween falling on a Friday, when a large portion of the target audience would otherwise be busy, box office receipts for the weekend of October 31 to November 2 were the lowest of the year, with a total of $48.3 million. Also contributing to the disappointment was the absence of any successful horror releases: The season’s leading horror release, Black Phone 2, grossed $8 million over the Halloween weekend, while the supposedly buzzy Shelby Oaks underperformed, earning just $770,000 from its relatively important release in more than 1,700 theaters.

Going to the movies during the Halloween holiday in North America was also affected by the climax of the World Series in Baseball, which ended in the early morning of November 2.

“Major releases this month have failed to deliver, plain and simple,” box office analyst Jeff Bock of Exhibitor Affairs told Variety.

“Apart from the moderately successful Black Phone 2, there haven’t been enough horror films to entice moviegoers. That should go without saying,” he added.

The news wasn’t all bad: Taylor Swift’s “The Official Release Party of a Showgirl” saw big business in its only weekend in theaters, pulling in $34 million between October 3 and 5.