You may not have realized this, but Rob Zombie's new horror film, The Lords of Salem came out this past weekend. How do I know that you might have skipped on this? Because the box office numbers came in and they are not pretty.
The movie opened in 355 theaters, which is considered a limited release and grossed $622,000 with a per-theater average of $1,752. My bong bro, and the biggest film buff I know, Axl Rosenberg of MetalSucks put this number into perspective:
To give you some sense of what that means: according to Box Office Mojo, other limited releases this weekend included the sports film Home Run, which opened in 381 theaters with a per-screen average of $4,260 and a total gross of $1,623,000, and the indie drama Filly Brown, which only opened at 188 theaters, but had a per-screen average of $7,250 and a total gross of $1,363,000. In fact, The Lords of Salem had the lowest per-screen average of ANY new release this weekend.
So yea, it didn't do too well. Axl noted that the film's distributor only paid $2 million for the movie, plus promotional costs, so they could theoretically recoup the money after the full run of the movie as well as DVD sales, but it's not going to be easy. It's safe to say this will be Zombie's least successful movie ever. Zombie will be doing more promoting next week at the Golden Gods awards, and on tour this summer as part of Mayhem Fest. But it may be too late by that point.
Did you see Lords of Salem this weekend? If so, what did you think of it?
