Madea Scares Away Tom Cruise’s Jack Reacher Sequel To Win Opening Weekend Box Office

Tyler Perry’s Boo! A Madea Halloween has narrowly defeated Tom Cruise’s Jack Reacher: Never Go Back to win the weekend box office.

Boo! A Madea Halloween earned a hefty $27.6 million in its opening weekend. That’s the third highest-grossing opening ever for Perry’s popular Madea franchise.

Cruise’s Jack Reacher: Never Go Back trailed Madea to a second place box office finish, earning $23 million in its opening weekend.

The competition seemed close after Friday night, with Boo! A Madea Halloween earning $9.4 million and Jack Reacher: Never Go Back earning $8.9 million, but Madea’s lead only widened as the weekend continued. Boo! A Madea Halloween even surpassed the $20 million benchmark it was projected for.

Ouija: Origin of Evil trailed well behind the top two, settling into third place with a $14.1 million opening weekend. This is well within the range of Universal Pictures own projections, though a bit shy of what trackers had expected.

Ben Affleck’s latest, The Accountant, drops to fourth place in its second weekend, earning another $14 million.

Twentieth Century Fox’s comedy Keeping Up With the Joneses struggled to find any footing amid a crowded box office. The film – which stars Gal Gadot, Isla Fisher, Zach Galifianakis, Jon Hamm and Patton Oswalt – earned just $5.6 million in its opening weekend after being projected for $8 million.

In Tyler Perry’s Boo! A Madea Halloween, Madea winds up in the middle of mayhem when she spends a hilarious, haunted Halloween fending off killers, paranormal poltergeists, ghosts, ghouls and zombies while keeping a watchful eye on a group of misbehaving teens.

In Jack Reacher: Never Go Back, investigator Jack Reacher (Tom Cruise) springs into action after the arrest of Susan Turner (Cobie Smulders), an Army major accused of treason. Suspecting foul play, Jack embarks on a mission to prove that the head of his old unit is innocent. After crossing paths with the law, Reacher must now go on the lam to uncover the truth behind a major government conspiracy that involves the death of U.S. soldiers.

In Ouija: Origin of Evil, in 1967 Los Angeles, widowed mother Alice Zander (Elizabeth Reaser) unwittingly invites authentic evil into her home by adding a new stunt to bolster her séance scam business. When the merciless spirit overtakes her youngest daughter Doris (Lulu Wilson), the small family must confront unthinkable fears to save her and send her possessor back to the other side.

In Keeping Up With the Joneses, the Gaffneys’ lives are interrupted by the arrival of new neighbors, whose stunning looks are matched only by the worldly sophistication of their lives. Tim Jones is an accomplished travel writer whose hobbies include blowing glass, and his wife, Natalie, is a social media consultant, cooking blogger and heroine to Sri Lankan orphans. The Gaffneys soon find themselves in the center of a storm of international espionage that gives them a breathtaking glimpse of life outside their cul-de-sac.