This past weekend at the box office was a veritable bloodbath not in the literal sense but speaking of the carob syrup variety. Scream 4, which was expected to be at least as successful as its predecessors, fell upon its own knife (and certainly wasn’t helped by David Arquette and Courteney Cox’s boner-related TMI) to draw only $19.3 million from audiences. The newest kid’s film, Rio, easily took first place with $40 million even though Hop (which nabbed third place) is still out there in circulation as well.

Of the remaining holdovers, the inspirational sports drama, Soul Surfer, grabbed fourth place; the Cate Blanchett sci-fi revenge flick, Hanna, took fifth; and Arthur slid way down to sixth place (because nobody likes poor live-action Russell Brand). On a more impressive note, The Conspirator (which Kaiser has already noted was pretty damn good) debuted with $3.9 million to land in ninth place; but don’t be fooled by the low place rank because that movie was only showing on about 700 screens as opposed to the 3800 and 3200 screens upon which Rio and Scream opened, respectively speaking. Of course, the film industry is now aghast at Scream‘s poor turnout, and the analysis of why this happened has commenced with fury:

Before Scream 4 was released this weekend, tracking indicated an opening in the mid- to high $20sM for this 4th film in the Scream franchise which comes 11 years after the 3rd film. But after Friday’s so-so debut and Saturday’s declining grosses, it won’t make even the lower end of predictions. The Miramax/Dimension/Weinstein Co’s 15-year-old Scream franchise kept the formula that made it so popular in the first place — including producer/director Wes Craven, screenwriter Kevin Williamson who bailed mid-production because of Weinstein meddling, and orignal castmembers Courteney Cox, David Arquette, and Neve Campbell — then added Hayden Panettiere and Emma Roberts (Julia’s niece and Eric’s daughter). Maybe the entire concept should have been reworked. The result is that Scream as a franchise has little life left in it even though the Weinsteins kept insisting that it had a lot.

[From Deadline]

It must be noted that the above tracking figures do seriously downplay the situation in favor of the Weinsteins. Box Office Mojo’s derby predictions were for Scream 4 to rake in $40.6, and that obviously didn’t happen by a long shot. Of course, one wonders why the Weinsteins bothered to release a horror movie in April when much of the target audience (teens and young adults) are preoccupied with seasonal activities such as prom and finals. There’s also the complicating fact that Scream actually saw a dropoff between Friday ($8.3 million) and Saturday ($6.7 million), which is actually the direct opposite of what happens with the horror genre (it’s a phenomenon that I’ve previously written about ad nauseum over at Pajiba if you’re interested). The thing about horror movies is that word of mouth matters so much during opening weekend, and a steep dropoff between Friday and Saturday could mean that audiences were disappointed in the movie and told other people not to go see it. Or, in the alternative, maybe very few people wanted to watch Scream 4 in the first place.

Photos via AllMoviePhoto