Box office: Two killer clown movies meet very different fates, while animated movies pick up the slack in a slow week

Terrifier 3 set a very good record for its franchise, Joker 2 set a very bad record for movies in general, and animation of all sorts took up half the top ten.

I refuse to post any pics from this week’s top new film, so instead, here are the five animated movies that made up half of this week’s top ten.

Two dark clown movies took their franchises in completely opposite directions this week:

• Terrifier 3, an unrated low-budget horror film, became the unexpected #1 movie of the weekend with an estimated $18.3 million, which is more than the first two Terrifiers grossed in their entire theatrical runs combined.

• Joker: Folie à Deux, the big-budget supervillain sequel, dropped faster in its second weekend than almost any movie ever and is now on track to make significantly less money in its entire theatrical run than the first Joker made in its first weekend alone.

Aside from that, there were some other highlights on this week’s chart:

• Animated movies dominated the (admittedly weak) list, and the diversity of the medium was on full display, as The Wild Robot and Transformers One had two of the better holds of the week, Piece by Piece told the life story of Pharrell Williams through computer-animated Lego, My Hero Academia: You’re Next had one of the anime series’ softer North American openings, and the stop-motion classic The Nightmare before Christmas got yet another pre-Halloween re-release.

• Films about New York media figures in the 1970s struggled, as Saturday Night—about the creation of Saturday Night Live—grossed just $3.4 million in its first weekend of wide release, while The Apprentice, a movie about the early days of Donald Trump, nearly failed to land in the top ten altogether.

Overall revenues were just over $70 million, which made this the worst weekend at the box office since May 31-June 2, and one of the nine worst of the year so far.

And now, a few more stats and facts re: this week’s top ten, title by title: