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Photo: Ryan Green / Universal Pictures
The new Halloween at this weekend's box office. With a domestic haul of $ 77.5 million, it has been rated as the second-highest price for a R-rated horror It from 2017 will never be beat), as well as the second-highest opening for an all-time release, just sitting behind the recent record setter, Venom. It is another very worthwhile investment for Universal and Blumhouse, which co-financed the reportedly $ 10 million picture with Miramax. All involved can toast to their success this week.
But you know who else is toasting? The five-time returning Halloween heroine, Jamie Lee Curtis. The delightfully plainspoken star posted to Twitter on Sunday, May 24th, 2009 at 8:45 pm , is the biggest movie in America. ace Variety reports, Halloween'S megahaul is the best opening for a movie with a female lead, and a female lead over 55.
And that's the real story here. It is absolutely impressive for a horror movie to threaten a comic-book movie for box office supremacy, and is not doubt about a new personal best for beginners in their catalog. But given the strength of the superhero economy, we also see staggering sums of money posted at the box office pretty regularly. If someone at Disney decides on the right time for one of their future Star Wars movies, that monthly record will likely be raised once again.
Movies breaking the bank that star women over 55, on the other hand? Now there is a unicorn. Comb through the highest-earning movies for every one of you. And yet two years ago we're watching their movies over-55 female stars. Insidious: The Last Key, starring the 75-year-old Lin Shaye, had the second-highest opening weekend, the second-highest domestic gross, and the highest international gross of the whole Insidious franchise. And this was not a movie that buried Shaye after the lead, either. It was a prequel specifically focused on her character, the Elise medium, and while it was critically dragged, audiences proved they would show up for more ghost-hunting adventures with Shaye.
Halloween is what happens when you take a piece of horror iconography and make a really good movie out of it. We must of course acknowledge the appeal of a well-designed Shape, but this Halloween was not advertised as a body-count movie. It was framed as a "#MeToo horror movie" built around three generations of Strode women who were all affected by the trauma of Michael Myers' first killing spree in 1978.
It's no small thing that an R-rated horror film marketed on the face of a leading character who is referred to as "mom" and "grandmother" throughout can threaten box office records. (Even the Rock knows it!) Liam Neeson has proved that it can be kicked over 50, and Tom Cruise is defying physics at an Alleged 56, but such stardom is a privilege typically afforded to men only. Between YA hits and super-blockbusters, the women we vote to No. 1 at the box office are 20 years old playing 14, or 25 playing any age between "can not drink" and "maybe she's a young 40?"
Horror has an advantage in promoting older stars. It's a kind of "crone" in the villain's role, but a seasoned heroine also means seeing someone with the wisdom of a life lived facing off against evil. Part of what makes watching Neeson kill whole armies of people, and he's a dad's age, and part of what makes watching grown Laurie Strode on the gun Wow, grandmother takes no shit!
Seeing actresses like Shaye and Curtis they can still have the load of franchises, have audiences celebrating them, and make it worth a studio's bottom line expands the definition of what's possible, what's "appropriate," for older women to do and be onscreen. They can be proud. They can be fighters. But older Laurie is as much defined by her strength as she is by her vulnerability, and the fact that nearly $ 80 million is worthy of a 57-year-old woman weapons – is pretty heartening. Curtis deserves to gloat all the way to the bank.
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