Scary ‘Messengers’ debuts at No. 1

Diane Keaton's ‘Because I Said So’ takes second-place spot

	Jess (Kristen Stewart) and Ben (Evan and Theodore Turner) are tormented in "The Messengers."
Columbia Pictures

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updated 6:25 p.m. ET Feb. 4, 2007

LOS ANGELES - The fright film “The Messengers,” about a city family that moves into a creepy haunted house in the country, debuted as the top weekend movie with $14.5 million in ticket sales.

Opening in second place was Diane Keaton and Mandy Moore’s mother-daughter comedy “Because I Said So,” the Universal release taking in $13 million, according to studio estimates Sunday.

The latest in a string of horror hits from Sony, “The Messengers” bumped off the previous weekend’s No. 1 flick, 20th Century Fox’s “Epic Movie,” which slipped to third place with $8.2 million, raising its 10-day total to $29.4 million.

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It was a quiet weekend at theaters as many fans were preoccupied with Sunday’s Super Bowl. The top 12 movies took in $71.6 million, down 12.5 percent compared to the same weekend last year.

Box office results
Estimated ticket sales for Nov. 6-8
1. "A Christmas Carol," $31 million.
2. "Michael Jackson's This Is It," $14 million.
3. "The Men Who Stare at Goats," $13.3 million.
4. "The Fourth Kind," $12.5 million.
5. "Paranormal Activity," $8.6 million.
6. "The Box," $7.9 million.
7. "Couples Retreat," $6.4 million.
8. "Law Abiding Citizen," $6.2 million.
9. "Where the Wild Things Are," $4.2 million.
10. "Astro Boy," $2.6 million.

“The Messengers” — starring Dylan McDermott, Penelope Ann Miller, John Corbett and Kristen Stewart — is the first English-language film from Hong Kong siblings Danny and Oxide Pang, whose horror tales include “The Eye.”

It was the seventh-straight year that Sony had the No. 1 movie on Super Bowl weekend, many of them similar low-budgeted horror hits such as last year’s “When a Stranger Calls.” “The Messengers” was shot on a thrifty $16 million budget.

“This business model of creating these modestly budgeted horror films is just something that consistently works for Sony,” said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracker Media By Numbers.

Key Academy Awards contenders continued cashing in on their honors, including best-picture nominees “The Queen” (Miramax) with a $2.7 million weekend, “The Departed” (Warner Bros.) with $2.3 million and “Babel” (Paramount Vantage) and “Letters From Iwo Jima” (Warner Bros.) with $1.7 million each.