Nightmare On Elm Street remake tops US box office -'Nightmare' wins weekend with $32.9M debut

New remake Freddy Kruger.


Box office dream...Jackie Earle Haley as Freddy Krueger


Jackie Earle Haley stars as Freddy in film No. 9


Rooney Mara in "Nightmare on Elm Street"

Horror remake A Nightmare on Elm Street has topped the north American box office after taking $32m (�21m) in its opening weekend, figures have revealed.

The film sees the return of serial killer Freddy Krueger, who appeared in the original 1984 Wes Craven movie.



Last week's top earner, How To Train Your Dragon, fell to second place with slapstick comedy Date Night in third.

At number four was Jennifer Lopez's The Back-Up Plan and rounding off the top five was family film Furry Vengeance.

"A Nightmare on Elm Street" led the weekend box office as the remake of the 1980s slasher film debuted with $32.9 million.

Freddy Krueger is back, only he's just not himself. In fact, he's someone else altogether.

A Nightmare on Elm Street, No. 9 in the series and a remake of No. 1, opens Friday, but this version of the iconic slasher flick is the first not to involve either slash-maestro Wes Craven as director or Robert Englund as Krueger, the man with the melted face who stalks dreams of his victims and kills them with a razor-armed metal glove.

For the new picture, Freddy is played by Jackie Earle Haley, who attracted attention in 2006's Little Children and this year's creepy Shutter Island. In place of Craven, Samuel Bayer (best known as a commercial and music video director) took the helm, and Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer wrote the screenplay, which again has serial killer Freddy, in his fedora and green-and-red-striped shirt, haunting the dreams of a group of suburban teens.

But if the original Nightmare, from 1984, was so shiveringly memorable, why do it again?

"Not every movie should be remade, but this is a franchise that had run out of steam," Bayer says. "Freddy had become a bit of a comedic character; he had lost some of his power to scare people. We have to wipe the slate clean and start over again. So it's not a remake, it's a reinvention of the legend of Freddy Krueger."

New Line Cinema's Walter Hamada says the natural progression of horror franchises is that the scary things become less scary, more campy. "The best franchises to reboot are the ones that go off the rail," says Hamada, a senior vice president at New Line, long known, he adds, as the "house that Freddy built." The studio had successes in remaking the original Friday the 13th last year and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 2006.

Nightmare became one of the "most treasured" horror franchises in Hollywood because it tapped into a fear that anyone around the world could recognize: the fear of being attacked in your dreams, Hamada says. "It's the idea that if you die in your nightmare, you die for real. It taps into universal fears � everyone's got nightmares."

And everybody likes to be scared silly at the movies.

"We love that sense of sitting on the edge of our seats, palms sweating, stomach churning," says Diane Robina, president of FEARnet, the on-demand, online horror channel that is celebrating the new movie with a month of Nightmare-related content.

"It allows people to safely face their fears," adds Mick Garris, a veteran horror writer and director (Critters 2, Sleepwalkers) who is a friend of Craven and Englund and interviewed both for his show, Post Mortem, on FEARnet.

Moviemaking tools, such as CGI and 3-D, have improved in 26 years, but computer-generated effects are not what scares people, Bayer says. "What scares you is that you believe that the Freddy Krueger who exists in your dreams is somehow also flesh and blood. And you recognize a part of yourself in the characters he threatens."

Since 1984, the famously loyal fan base for horror has grown even deeper and wider, Robina says, so remaking A Nightmare on Elm Street is a smart idea from a marketing perspective. She predicts that both old and new fans will want to see the new film, as demonstrated by the success of the remake of Friday the 13th last year.

"But the key is going to be whether it's authentic," she says. "If (the new film) is not good, they will not support it � the (filmmakers) have got to deliver something good."


The top 20 movies at U.S. and Canadian theaters Friday through Sunday, followed by distribution studio, gross, number of theater locations, average receipts per location, total gross and number of weeks in release, as compiled Monday by Hollywood.com are:

1. "A Nightmare On Elm Street," Warner Bros., $32,902,299, 3,332 locations, $9,875 average, $32,902,299, one week.

2. "How to Train Your Dragon," Paramount, $10,614,289, 3,426 locations, $3,098 average, $192,173,750, six weeks.

3. "Date Night," Fox, $7,577,352, 3,093 locations, $2,450 average, $73,604,361, four weeks.

4. "The Back-up Plan," CBS Films, $7,255,762, 3,280 locations, $2,212 average, $22,963,517, two weeks.

5. "Furry Vengeance," Summit, $6,627,564, 2,997 locations, $2,211 average, $6,627,564, one week.

6. "The Losers," Warner Bros., $5,888,471, 2,936 locations, $2,006 average, $18,013,781, two weeks.

7. "Clash of the Titans," Warner Bros., $5,855,368, 2,737 locations, $2,139 average, $153,911,073, five weeks.

8. "Kick-ass," Lionsgate, $4,515,940, 2,542 locations, $1,777 average, $42,228,273, three weeks.

9. "Death at a Funeral," Sony Screen Gems, $4,123,105, 2,271 locations, $1,816 average, $34,900,278, three weeks.

10. "Oceans," Disney, $2,564,843, 1,210 locations, $2,120 average, $13,460,115, two weeks.

11. "The Last Song," Disney, $2,255,782, 2,276 locations, $991 average, $58,600,765, five weeks.

12. "Alice in Wonderland," Disney, $1,478,225, 1,050 locations, $1,408 average, $329,686,666, nine weeks.

13. "Hot Tub Time Machine," MGM, $1,125,651, 1,112 locations, $1,012 average, $47,636,575, six weeks.

14. "Diary of a Wimpy Kid," Fox, $981,535, 1,166 locations, $842 average, $60,899,640, seven weeks.

15. "The Bounty Hunter," Sony, $846,334, 891 locations, $950 average, $64,065,681, seven weeks.

16. "Tyler Perry's Why Did I Get Married Too?," Lionsgate, $812,234, 727 locations, $1,117 average, $58,736,999, five weeks.

17. "City Island," Anchor Bay, $733,338, 269 locations, $2,726 average, $2,086,876, seven weeks.

18. "Housefull," Eros, $642,156, 82 locations, $7,831 average, $642,156, one week.

19. "Avatar," Fox, $633,124, 387 locations, $1,636 average, $747,292,481, 20 weeks.

20. "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," Music Box Films, $510,509, 199 locations, $2,565 average, $4,632,005, seven weeks.

Is A 'Nightmare on Elm Street' Sequel Coming? New Freddy Says Maybe

The 2010 reboot of "Nightmare on Elm Street" hit theaters over the weekend, so now, where does the franchise go from here? Will there be another Freddy movie?

In an interview with MTV, actor Jackie Earle Haley -- who plays Freddy Krueger in the revamped version -- revealed that he was signed on for a "few movies."



"I think we need to see how the movie turns out, how that goes and how that does [before pursuing a sequel]," Haley said.

Well, the film debuted in first place over the weekend, taking in $32.2 million to open. Obviously, fans aren't ready to give up on the iconic horror character, even if the original actor, Robert Englund, has hung up the claws.

There's still no official word from either Warner Bros or New Line, but we're hopeful ... because we want the "Elm Street" franchise to continue.
If they do, other actors said they'd return. MTV asked actress Rooney Mara about her role as Nancy. She said she'd love to play the character again.

However, Kyle Gallner, who plays Nancy's boyfriend Quentin, wasn't 100% on anything just yet.

What did you think of the new "Nightmare on Elm Street?" Does it have a future?

How Freddy Kruger changed horror movies..into comedy..

At some point in the 1980s, probably around the time of the fourth or fifth Friday the 13th sequel, I realized that horror movies had, in effect, become comedies. It was all part of a ritual. You went out to the multiplex with your buddies, or maybe on a date, to see the latest by-the-numbers blood feast in which a sick young man in a goalie mask devised creative new ways to gouge and dismember a series of good- looking and eminently dispensable bad actors. In theory, everyone in the audience was there to be scared, to be shocked into fear by the awesome savagery on display. Yet these movies, in the space of about five years, had grown so formulaic, so predictable in their extremity and slaughter, that their very �terror� had turned fatally campy.



And so the audience cowered, and trembled a bit, and jumped out of their seats � and laughed. We laughed at the giddy fun of being scared, but also at the sheer dumb corny roteness of those hulking, heavy-breathing faux-brute killers. The predictability of it all was funny, and maybe borderline insulting, a kind of shared in-joke. On some level, it was all about the comic high of feeling superior � to the victims on screen, and to your own anxieties. Don�t go in the attic! Oh, look, he�s going in the attic! Watch that friggin� dumb-ass get what he deserves!�

But until A Nightmare on Elm Street, in 1984, we were all laughing at these movies, not with them. Freddy Krueger changed all that. Apart from the fact that he was a ghost who slaughtered you not in the basement or some godforsaken cabin but in your dreams, he certainly did have plenty in common with Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees, the two superstars of slasherdom. (Leatherface, the godather of them all, was a far greater screen character, but at that point The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was still a cult film, under the radar for most of the mass audience. Why, it hadn�t even spawned a sequel!) Yet Jason and Michael, in their angry, wordless, bruised-adolescent way, were straight men, lugs with machetes. Freddy, with his leer and his cackle and his slightly goofy scarecrow look, was a showman, a snarky demon clown, a burlesque master of ceremonies. In his first big scene in A Nightmare on Elm Street, he holds his arms out wide, like a wall-shadow parody of a boogeyman, then mockingly slices off two of his own fingers. A new kind of killer has arrived. He�s not just here to scare you � he�s here to have a good time doing it. Let�s party!

I should point out that there are many, many precedents to Freddy Krueger�s antic high comedy of evil-as-fun. Back in 1964, Herschell Gordon Lewis, the trash visionary who invented the slasher film, made his masterpiece of drive-in gore, Two Thousand Maniacs, and if you�ve never had a chance to see it, by all means get hold of a copy (it�s out on DVD). Set in a Southern small town whose residents take revenge on a pack of Yankee visitors by slaughtering them in gruesomely kooky ways, it�s an all-out funny monster-redneck bash. Texas Chainsaw was definitely influenced by it, and so, perhaps, was Sam Raimi when he made the Evil Dead films. The granddaddy of the slasher genre � and the greatest horror film ever made � is Psycho, which Pauline Kael (even though she never much cared for it) aptly described as �a gothic horror comedy.� The comedy is there in the movie�s shower-curtain-pulled-out-from-under-you slyness � but also, quite directly, in the character of Mrs. Bates, with her mockingly exaggerated scolding whine of a voice. Speaking of homicidal harridans, you can trace Freddy Krueger�s sinister, grinning gamesmanship right back to Margaret Hamilton�s Wicked Witch of the West, when she lights Ray Bolger�s arm and cackles, �How about a little fire, Scarecrow?�

All of these films know, on some basic level, that horror is comedy (or can be). What set Freddy Krueger apart is that, as played by Robert Englund (with madcap inspiration), he was at once the movie�s monster and its vaudeville host, standing outside the action, saying, in essence, �Get a load of this! Get a load of me!� And that stylized circus-ringmaster quality only grew as the Nightmare on Elm Street series went on. By the time of A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987), the best movie in the series apart from the first one, Freddy popped up as a kind of giant slime-snake, looking like nothing so much as a float in the homecoming parade. He couldn�t smash a girl�s face into a television set without rasping �This is it, Jennifer! Your big break in TV! Welcome to prime time, bitch!� At that point, the audience was definitely having fun � and, in effect, rooting for the killer. Like Freddy, we, too, were standing outside the action, watching ourselves watch Freddy scare us, and laughing at the whole fun-house charade.

Of course, it�s not as if horror movies after Freddy just became comedies. By and large, they went back to being played straight. Yet what had begun in the days of those junky and interchangeable slasher flicks, and what Freddy more or less officially locked into place, was the garish, low-comedy, eye-rolling disposability of the horror genre. It wasn�t so much that horror films could now be funny. (Many of the best ones, from Psycho to Night of the Living Dead to Chainsaw to Carrie, had always been funny.) It was that horror films were now almost defiantly movies not to take seriously. Freddy ushered in an era where you almost had to laugh at them, or the joke was on you.