Battle at the Box Office 9/11

After some of the most horribly performing weekends in box office history, the new IT arrived and shattered records with an incredible opening weekend.

Making over $123 million, IT was easily the highest grossing opening ever for an R rated horror film (and just horror in general) and the highest ever Fall and September openings.  It was also the widest ever release for an R rated film and had the second highest ever opening for an R rated film, coming up shy of Deadpool’s opening.  The previous record holder for R rated horror was Paranormal Activity 3, which made $52.5 million.

With the fifth largest gap ever between first and second place, Home Again took second place with $9 million, which puts it 14th for Reese Witherspoon openings between Cruel Intentions and Pleasantville.

The Hitman’s Bodyguard dropped to third place with $4.8 million, bringing it to just shy of $65 million.

Annabelle: Creation and Wind River rounded out the top 5 with the latter getting another 288 theaters and making $3.2 million, bringing it to $25 million total.

Nothing else really moved to drastically in the bottom of half of the top ten and there’s two R rated movies that could pose some competition to IT but it seems like a such a phenomenon that it seems like it has to repeat at #1 again this coming weekend, but we’ll see.