Friday Box-Office: 'The Devil Inside' Opens with a Monstrous $16.8 Million

Friday Box-Office: ‘The Devil Inside’ Opens with a Monstrous $16.8 Million

January 7, 2012

By Brad Brevet

Well go figure, congrats to Paramount for a truly effective marketing campaign as the trailers for The Devil Inside were clearly effective in getting audiences into the theater. Advance reviews on the film weren’t available and once reviews started trickling in (mine included) they weren’t exactly positive with the majority of them coming down primarily on the film’s ending as it now has a 7% rating at RottenTomatoes.

It appears audiences were also unimpressed. The Hollywood Reporter reports the following:

Devil Inside is as polarizing as it is successful. Overall, it received an F CinemaScore on Friday night, although almost as many gave it an A (16 percent) as did an F (19 percent). The majority, or 47 percent, gave it a C and a D.

With $16.8 million on Friday ($2 million of that from midnight screenings) the film is targeting an expected $30 million for the weekend, which would result in a top five January opening, which makes the film, which Paramount picked up for a reported $1 million, highly profitable. It certainly will be winning the weekend.

In second is Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol with $6.2 million bringing its domestic cume to more than $155 million. It will likely end the weekend with $18 million or so, ahead of Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy expanded this weekend from 57 theaters to 809 and took in an estimated $1.7 million on Friday and may approach $5 million for the weekend and a cumulative total of $10 million.

Angelina Jolie’s In the Land of Blood and Honey brought in $7,800 from seven theaters and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close brought in $26,000 as it is still in only six theaters and won’t expand wide until January 20.

I have included Friday’s top ten directly below and will be back Sunday morning with a complete wrap-up.