• by Wayne Friedman , October 16, 2022

Universal Pictures' “Halloween Ends” theatrical opening scored a strong $41.3 million, easily winning the weekend among theatrical movies -- even amidst another simultaneous release of NBCUniversal's Peacock for the “Halloween” movie franchise.

A year ago, Universal's “Halloween Kills” pulled in $49.4 million in its opening weekend -- also starting up on Peacock at the same time.

“Notably the last film to open to more than $40 million at the domestic box office was Universal's own “Nope” in July... Universal has released four of the 12 films that have opened to $40 million or more in 2022, the most of any studio,” according to Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst of Comscore.

This year's “Halloween” film scored strong results even as the franchise national TV marketing was a bit lower in volume versus a year ago.

For this year's version of the movie, the studio spent $10.3 million, resulting in 785 million impressions, according to estimates from iSpot.tv.

NBCTelevision Network got 137 million impressions -- the bulk of this being national TV exposure. Overall, on all networks, there were 2,328 airings of TV commercials for the movie.

A year ago, “Halloween Kills”, placed $14.7 million in national TV, grabbing a much sizable 1.2 billion impressions -- 3,269 airings of TV commercials -- some 295.6 million impressions on the NBC Television Network.

The third week of Paramount’s “Smile” brought in a healthy $12.4 million -- now totalling $71.2 million, good for second place. Next was Sony Pictures' “Lyle, Lyle Crocodile, now in its second week, was at $7.4 million -- now totaling $22.8 million domestically.