Shyamalan gets career reprieve as The Visit marks 2015 horror high

The comeback Critics seem divided on the merits or otherwise of M Night Shyamalan’s low-budget horror The Visit: a desperate found-footage last stand, or nimble genre retrenchment? But a $25.7m US debut – just pipped to the No 1 spot by erotic thriller The Perfect Guy – settles things in financial terms. It’s the strongest horror opening of the year (beating Insidious 3 and Poltergeist, both $22.6m), jumping up strongly from Friday to Saturday to put the $5m film, a collaboration with no-budget outfit Blumhouse, firmly in the black already. Like a big group playing a small venue, the Shyamalan name, soiled though it is, undoubtedly had some impact on the result. But he is also reliant on the downsized context – a small-scale story about a couple of kids staying with their freaky grandparents – as a means of proving to audiences and execs that he can still responsibly handle storytelling basics after recent mishaps. The minimal spend means that The Visit is less dependent on success in overseas territories, though his reputation there is in need of repair, too. Achieving $3.8m across 14 territories this weekend is fine, but the numbers are only half the point (they’re actually some of the lowest of his career, though the tiny budget alleviates any pressure). Even more pointedly than Kathryn Bigelow on The Hurt Locker ($49.2m worldwide) or Ang Lee on Brokeback Mountain ($178.1m) – both of whom were not struggling as much as Shyamalan – the goal is to create the perception of a back-to-basics career rebirth; a more wholesale exculpation than the kind of whim-driven, low-budget sabbaticals enjoyed by Roland Emmerich on Anonymous and Tim Burton on Big Eyes. The next weeks, as The Visit rolls out internationally, will determine how widely that perception has taken root. But at the very least, Shyamalan can book The Visit 2 into his diary. The young-adult pretender The release of Mockingjay Part 2, the final Hunger Games, is going to leave a gaping young-adult-size hole to fill. It’s unclear how many more Maze Runners there will be (the first James Dashner book has two sequels and prequels apiece), but the Fox franchise seems to be stealing a march in the succession race. The initial batch of 21 territories for the sequel, Scorch Trials, are 40% up on the first film, with a sizeable jump even in the UK (Maze Runner: $3.2m; Scorch Trials: $4.4m), one of the first places you’d expect YA fatigue to take hold. Most importantly, the series is putting a clear distance between itself and its rival, Divergent, which Lionsgate was surely banking on to replace its Hunger Games cash cow. The Maze Runner made an unexpected $340.6m worldwide in 2014 – on a very frugal $34m budget, crucially. Both Divergent and Insurgent, despite a much weightier celebrity quotient in the shape of Ashley Judd, Kate Winslet, emerging prospects Miles Teller and overall headliner Shailene Woodley, were considerably short of that total with much higher overheads: $288m on an $85m budget for Divergent, $295m on $110m for the sequel. Perhaps Maze Runner’s stripped-back, almost existential, B-movie stylings are what gave it the edge over Divergent’s laboured Hunger Games copycat act. Scorch Trials ventures into more conventionally operatic dystopian territory, and the budget (currently unpublished) is sure to be higher this time. But for now, it has the upper hand. China in your hand Another week, another stack of Chinese records. Most significant was local fantasy CGI/live-action hybrid Monster Hunt finally passing Furious 7 to become the country’s highest-grossing film ever – breaking the 2.426bn yuan needed. It should be pointed out that Monster Hunt took twice as long as the Vin Diesel caper to get there, also capitalising on the summer blackout on Hollywood films. But perhaps Hollywood, in the long run, benefits from taking a breather, too, with pent-up demand for US razzmatazz boosting the first run of blockbusters to hit the country afterwards: especially welcome if your film is drowning, as with Terminator Genisys a few weeks back. Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation or Minions are hardly in that position, but they have certainly made the most of their Chinese bows this week. Rogue Nation’s $18.5m opening last Tuesday was a non-3D record, setting it coasting to $86m over its first six days – a little off the pace of Jurassic World ($100.8m over five days) in June. Sunday’s takings of $20.1m for Minions, meanwhile, is a record opening day for an animation, and promises the kind of spree that might allow Universal’s Despicable Me spinoff a realistic shot at Frozen’s $1.27bn worldwide animation record. Rogue Nation won’t break any records, but a healthy showing out east will put it on par, or a little ahead, of Ghost Protocol’s $694.7m take. (Like Tom Cruise, the franchise is having to work harder to stay level as the years wear on.) Ant-Man, opening in the country on 16 October, is another marginal underperformer looking for a Chinese leg-up. Beyond Hollywood For once, the local hits producing ripples this week are European. Turkish-German comedy dynamo Bora Dagtekin is looking to top Germany’s yearly homegrown box office for the third time in four years with his sequel to 2013’s Fack Ju Göhte (a misspelt Fuck You Goethe), about a Munich bank robber forced to take a teaching job at the Goethe Institute in order to recover his stash. Number two just opened at a gigantic $20m, more than twice the original, which took $71.7m (and more elsewhere) to become the country’s second-highest local work, behind Til Schweiger’s romcom Rabbit Without Ears. In the UK, meanwhile, Krays biopic Legend opened to a magisterial $5.3m, in 14th global spot, buoyed up Tom Hardy’s twin-engine performance and plenty of tasty retrospective press coverage. That figure easily bests latter-day Brit gangster fodder like 2001’s Sexy Beast ($142K) and 2004’s Layer Cake ($1.9m), and is one step ahead of UK debuts for American crime fare like 2006’s The Departed ($4.2m), 2007’s American Gangster ($5.2m) and 2010’s The Town ($1.5m). Looks like Working Title has a nice little earner on its hands. The future Scorch Trials adds 41 territories, the bulk of the rest of its run, including South Korea – one of the top three markets for the first film (it opens in France on 7 October, and there’s no sign yet of a Chinese engagement). Everest, the bustlingly ensembled Josh Brolin-Sam Worthington-Jake Gyllenhaal-Keira Knightley $65m expedition, digs the crampons into close to 25 countries, including the US, UK and the director Baltasur Kormákur’s native Iceland. One of the island’s leading commercial lights, Kormákur will be hoping he can climb to a higher box-office plateau than his past Hollywood work, 2012’s Contraband ($96m worldwide) and 2013’s 2 Guns ($131m); the unusual bergefilm setting should set him on his way, though the first batch of reviews were underwhelming. In India, meanwhile, this past weekend’s big release, the Salman Khan-produced Hero, debuted to a Rs 200m shrug ($3m), but director Nikhil Advani isn’t hanging around, with “anti-love story” Katti Batti heading out seven days later. The anti-lovers in question are Imran Khan – megastar Aamir Khan’s nephew – and Kangana Ranaut, from Tanu Weds Manu Returns, one of Bollywood’s few big comedy hits this year. Top 10 global box office, 11-13 September 1. Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, $95.5m from 64 territories. $613m cumulative – 69.3% international; 30.7% US 2. (New) The Visit, $29.5m from 15 territories – 12.9% int; 87.1% US 3. Minions, $27.7m from 58 territories. $1.08bn cum – 69.3% int; 30.7% US 4. (New) Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials, $26.8m from 21 territories – 100% int 5. (New) The Perfect Guy, $26.7m from 1 territory – 100% US 6. (New) Fack Ju Göhte 2, $20m from 2 territories. $21.2m cum – 100% int 7. Straight Outta Compton, $8.4m from 16 territories. $180.7m cum – 13.8% int; 86.2% US 8. The Transporter Refuelled, $7.9m from 27 territories. $25.8m cum – 48.4% int; 51.6% US 9. War Room, $7.7m from 13 territories. $40.5m cum – 0.3% int; 99.7% US 10. Inside Out, $6.8m from 35 territories. $747.4m cum – 53% int; 47% US • Thanks to Rentrak. This week’s figures are based on estimates; all historical figures unadjusted, unless otherwise stated.