The creepy little girls from Paranormal Activity 3.

If you thought the only records being broken this weekend were on the football field, think again.  At the movie theater, another long-time record was being smashed.  The movie Paranormal Activity 3, the third movie in which a family is harassed by demons while video taping all the action, had itself a pretty good weekend thanks in no small part to the approaching Halloween season.  Paranormal Activity 3 landed a $54-million-dollar debut at the box office, making it the highest-grossing October movie of all time.  Not only did it beat Jackass 3D‘s $50-million-dollar take last year, it also topped Paranormal Activity 2‘s $40.7 million as the best debut of the PA series.

“Ultimately, it gets back to why there’s still a theatrical business, why people still go to the movies,” said Don Harris, Paramount’s president of distribution. “We want to laugh in a group, we want to be scared in a group, people like to cry in a group in the dark where nobody can see them crying.  It’s all the reason movie theaters exist and this genre has always been front and center.”

Another reason why Paranormal Activity 3 did so well?  It’s the best movie of the series overall, even better than the first Paranormal Activity.  The PA3 trailers were great, and gave away none of the movie’s actual action.  Directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, of Catfish fame, are great at blurring the line between fiction and reality, and the movie itself was packed with visually-interesting scares from the opening bell.  I highly recommend it for anyone who likes to be scared, or to watch other people be scared.

Tags: Paranormal Activity 3, Paranormal Activity 3 grosses million dollars, largest October debut ever, Paranormal Activity 3 breaks October box office record, Don Harris, Henry Joost, Ariel Schulman, Paranormal Activity, Jackass 3D, Paranormal Activity 2, movie debuts, Hollywood, horror movies

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the flooding that followed, the New Orleans Times-Picayune and NOLA.com did a wonderful job in updating the outside world about the conditions in their city, and have further kept going in bringing the city back together in the wake of the hurricane.  Unfortunately, this is a “what have [...]

Hewlett-Packard is one of the world’s largest companies, and as such, they are not immune to mistakes.  Given their current revolving door at CEO, it’s no wonder the company has been making some bad decisions.  Paying too much money for Palm, killing the TouchPad, and generally just making mistakes left and right due to not [...]

Facebook’s IPO has been an incredible windfall for its founders, and a huge flop for investors.  Since the massive IPO late last week, the stock price has collapsed.  There are concerns over ad sales, revenues in general, and now, there are allegations of insider trading after people have alleged that Morgan Stanley warned favored investors [...]

Solar eclipses are very rare, but they probably should be used as an excuse for a car accident.  Then again, if you saw the sun disappearing, you might freak out a little bit.  A 26-year-old San Bernadino, California, woman blames the recent solar eclipse on a car accident in which she hit a woman and [...]

The Orlando Magic really want to keep Dwight Howard after this season.  Dwight Howard, slam dunk champion,  is one of the best centers in the NBA and that’s a hard thing to come by these days.  Orlando knows they have to do something big to convince Howard to resign with their team, and they’ve done [...]

It was as dramatic as the closing sequence of any James Bond movie.  The clock was counting down–5, 4, 3, 2, 1–and at the last second, everything ground to a halt.  It wasn’t some evil plot that was stopped, but a good plot.  Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, a pioneer in commercial space flight, was scheduled [...]

At one point, the toning shoe was a fad that you could not get away from.  It was a basic sneaker with an odd-shaped sole that was supposedly designed to help the wearer burn more calories and tone up while doing essentially nothing to add to their fitness level.  As it turns out, just walking [...]