2009
Paranormal Activity opens
A haunted-house film shot for $15,000 reaches theaters in 12 college towns, starting a fan-driven run to a worldwide gross near $194 million.
On September 25, 2009, a small horror film called Paranormal Activity began its theatrical life in an unusual way. Instead of opening across the country, it played in 12 college towns, among them Boulder, Colorado; Columbus, Ohio; Madison, Wisconsin; and Seattle. Eleven of the 12 shows sold out. The only exception was State College, Pennsylvania, where a Penn State football game drew the crowd away that night. The film took in $36,146 on its first day.
The movie was already two years old. Oren Peli wrote, directed, shot, and edited it himself, spending about $15,000. He filmed in a private house in the Rancho Peñasquitos area of San Diego over a self-imposed schedule of seven days. Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat play a young couple who set up a home video camera to record the presence that seems to stalk them at night. There was no real script: the two actors improvised from outlines of each scene.
After a festival screening in 2007, the film reached Jason Blum, who helped Peli re-edit it, and then executives at DreamWorks. The studio first planned a bigger-budget remake. That idea changed after a test screening, when viewers walked out because they were too frightened to stay. Paramount bought the domestic rights for $350,000, cut and added scenes, and shot a new ending.
Why it matters
The release itself became part of the story. Peli invited fans to “demand” the film for their own city through the website Eventful, the first time a major studio used the service to market a movie. When the requests passed one million in October, Paramount sent the film into wide release on October 16. It went on to earn nearly $108 million in the United States and about $194 million worldwide.
Measured by return on its original budget, Paranormal Activity is often described as the most profitable film ever made, although that claim is hard to verify once marketing costs are counted. Its success launched a long-running series, starting with Paranormal Activity 2 in 2010, and showed studios how far a low-cost found-footage film could travel.
Did you know?
The home video release ends with about 15 minutes of names. Paramount offered to credit the fans who had demanded the film, and more than 170,000 people sent in their names within 24 hours.
