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Kim Hollis: Eat your heart out, big budget blockbusters. Something called The Purge somehow opened to $34.1 million against only a $3 million budget. Please explain how this could happen.

Jay Barney: If you ask me, this is a much bigger story than what happened last weekend at the box office on a number of different levels. The Purge was advertised just the right way. It never came across as a pure horror flick. There was a creepy philosophical element to it that audiences obviously embraced. Tracking everywhere was way off, from most low balling this opening by half to our own Reagen Sulewski missing it by over $20 million. I doubt anybody could have seen this coming, though.

This is a perfect example of positive buzz and early anticipation for a film; the new movie of the week and internet excitement made this incredibly successful. Everyone in the business saw a decent to good opening weekend coming for The Purge, but the film obviously benefited from the attention and its success skyrocketed. Now You See Me had the same thing happen last weekend.

Brett Ballard-Beach: I am aware of (though in no way was a target of) what sounds like a terrific social media campaign, which punched up what is an awesome high concept for a feature, turning the home invasion genre on its ear slightly. (Set aside the fact that the reviews and now weekend buzz have been lackluster.) Features I have read indicated that people who never turn out opening weekend for horror films or who only attend say, one, horror film a year, were excited for this. It is one I (in a younger incarnation) would have been out for on opening day. As with Now You See Me, I think it is also benefiting from some lackluster blockbusters that have led audiences to seek out something that at least has a faint whiff of originality. It may also be just the right film to come along in a world where a 3D printed gun, and all the unfathomable implications that carries, is now a reality.

Edwin Davies: I think the key to this success lies in the novelty of the concept, which is a pretty solid Twilight Zone-esque one if on its own, but which also prompts people to think, "Well, what would I do if all crime was legal?" The concept itself might not stand up to all that much scrutiny, and by all accounts the film pretty much just uses it as a jumping off point for a fairly standard home invasion thriller, but it's provocative in a way most horror films aren't, and I think that the social media campaign played off of that idea pretty well. On top of that, the home invasion storyline is one that hits people close to, well, home, and the success of The Strangers a few years ago demonstrated that people can be drawn to a story that places horror in a safe, familiar setting. It hits them in a very vulnerable place, psychologically speaking, and if played well, that can have a huge impact. The combination of that with a premise that people haven't seen before seems to have drawn people out in spite of the lukewarm response, though I think that might keep it from doing as well as it could have if it was actually good, since it's got the next couple of weeks all to itself as far as horror is concerned.

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