Buried deep within Variety’s weekend box office report is a rather eye-brow-raising stat. Late Night With the Devil, which is proving to be one of the biggest breakout indie hits in recent memory, is reportedly on track to gross an estimated $666,666 at the box office today. The final numbers aren’t in, but what a ghoulish, perhaps even unholy, surprise this is. It’s the kind of publicity you can’t buy, and to be fair, Variety’s report might be off a bit. When I put together our own box office report here on JoBlo, I tend to follow the numbers put out by Paul Dergarabedian at Comscore, and so far, he hasn’t listed Late Night With the Devil’s daily gross. It’s an indie flick, and the reporting from IFC might be delayed, given their more limited resources. Usually, box office analysts can crunch numbers on Sunday in a pretty accurate way, so it’s possible, if the numbers have some good math behind them, the movie may indeed make $666k, even if the $666,666 number cited by Variety seems a bit tough to swallow.
One thing to note is that Late Night With the Devil’s per-screen average beat out the bigger-budget Immaculate this weekend, which is very impressive for a film that’s only benefitting from a quick stopover in theatres before it hits Shudder on April 19th. It will likely be their biggest streaming debut to date, with it posting distributor IFC Films’ biggest opening ever. Our critic, Tyler Nichols, thought that it was outstanding, and the film has earned raves from such horror notables as Stephen King, Kevin Smith and Paul Schrader. This weekend, Schrader (who often makes his contempt of new movies fairly obvious) wrote the following on his Facebook page:
LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL. A razor-sharp satire of 70s late-night television–so sharp at times it’s indistinguishable from the thing it satirizes–which evolves into a parody of possession and poltergeist movies. Can’t quite land the ending (that might not even be possible) but worth a trip to the cinema. Even on a rainy New York City afternoon.
Did you go see Late Night With the Devil this weekend? Let us know in the comments, and check out our interview with star David Dastmalchian tomorrow!
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