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The weekend-to-weekend percentage drop for It came in at a stellar -51.4%, considering that horror films are equated with the big second weekend drop. Four of the ten biggest drops for films on over 2,500 screens were horror – Friday the 13th (80%), The Purge (76%), Texas Chainsaw 3D (76%) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (72%) – and obviously, these are all remakes except The Purge. The remake of It changes the canvas from TV to film where anything goes, and Warner Bros. and New Line have an extremely lucrative property, and hopefully won’t blow it by turning what should be two films into three.

It cost the movie’s owner Warner Bros., the distributor New Line, and producer Rat Pac/Dune Entertainment a comparably tiny $35 million to make, so like Deadpool ($58 million budget) It was likely making real money after two days of release when looking at worldwide figures. The domestic gross is towering over the movie’s budget, as it stands at $218.7 million already. Overseas is the surprise for me. It brought the overseas total up to $152.6 million this weekend, giving It a worldwide score of $371.3 million after only 10 days of release. The question on everyone’s mind is how big will It get? Deadpool made $363 million domestically, but its holds in its later weekends won’t happen for It (I don’t think). I do think we will have our first $300 million domestic horror film though, and a sequel that can debut amazingly. It is one of those very special movies that doesn’t come around very often. Treasure It. See It.

For everyone who thought Mother! was going to come in second, you are plain wrong. I guess Jennifer Lawrence doesn’t draw them like she used to two years ago? Lawrence has been replaced by the even sexier Michael Keaton (and Taylor Kitsch and Dylan O’Brien, I guess) in American Assassins, which takes the silver this weekend. Compared to It, American Assassins’s weekend is downright pale, as it had an opening day of $5.8 million, which led to a weekend gross of $14.8 million, and carrying a whiff of the scariest summer in the box office record book. Out to 3,156 venues, Lionsgate chose to go quite wide with this one, and I guess it paid off. Lionsgate likely sold off any foreign rights it could on American Assassins, further reducing its financial risk ($33 million budget - plus marketing of course).

For Michael Keaton, this is enough to keep the roll going, I think, as it gets him past The Founder (blame Weinstein not Keaton). At IMDb, he has nothing listed between American Assassins and Dumbo, which comes out in 2019 by way of Tim Burton – reuniting Keaton and Burton for the first time since Beetlejuice in 1988. Really, though, American Assassins is O’Brien’s film, his comeback after breaking a leg making the upcoming Maze Runner threequel. This kid is a nose away from stardom, but he needs to find something bigger than AA or even The Death Cure, as that franchise feels like its heading towards the Divergent zone – where it eventually hits the cliff, and is never seen or heard from again (imagine the car going off the cliff, and the driver yelling, "we are going to turn the franchise into a TV shoooowwwwww’"as it plummets to the beach below and explodes into a zillion tiny pieces).

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