South Korea’s government voted to start a new investigation into the Halloween stampede in Seoul that killed 159 people.
The one group of lawmakers called the National Assembly approved the bill with a vote of 256-0. It will become a law after the conservative President Yoon Suk Yeol signs it and his government agency approves it. These are just formal steps because the president and his ruling party already agreed on the law.
The bill wants to find out why the crush happened, how the authorities responded to it, and who is responsible for it. It plans to make a group of nine people who will look into the disaster on their own for up to 15 months.
After the committee figures out who is to blame and who should be charged, they will tell the government’s investigators. The police would have to finish looking into the suspects within three months, as the new law says.
The crush was a big disaster in South Korea that made a lot of people very sad. Most of the people who were hurt were in their 20s and 30s. They had met in a popular area in Seoul called Itaewon to celebrate Halloween.
After the tragedy, people were mad at the government for not taking safety and rules seriously, even though they should have learned from the ferry sinking in 2014. That accident killed 304 people, most of them were teenagers on a school trip.
In early 2023, the police found that they didn’t plan well for a large crowd in Itaewon, even though they knew it would happen. At that time, investigators said police didn’t listen to calls from people who warned about a big crowd before it became dangerous.
Over 20 police and other officials are being tried for the disaster, but few high-ranking officials have been charged or held responsible. This has made families of the victims and opposition lawmakers ask for a separate investigation.
Before the vote, Kim Kyo-heung, a member of the Democratic Party and head of the safety committee in parliament, said he hoped that the investigation would find out who is responsible for the disaster and why it happened. He also wants to come up with a plan to stop this from happening again.
The families of the victims were happy about the new law and showed their support by gathering outside the National Assembly.
Lee Jeong-min, who speaks for the families, said today is a very special day for our grieving families. “We couldn’t have done it without the help of opposition politicians and lots of people who supported us. ” I want to thank them a lot.
President Yoon had said no to a new investigation of the disaster before. In January, he said no to a bill for an independent investigation of the Itaewon crush that had been approved by parliament.
But, when he met with Democratic Party leader Lee Jae-myung on Monday, he said he wouldn’t disagree with it, as long as some current disagreements are fixed, such as whether the fact-finding committee can ask for arrest warrants.
Yoon changed his position because people want him to work with Lee’s party, which won big in the April 10 election and will control parliament for four more years.
In a meeting on Wednesday, Lee’s party agreed to take out parts of the proposed law that were causing disagreement.
The head of the Democratic Party, Jin Sung-joon, said the party agreed to the president and his ruling party’s requests to help the grieving families who can’t wait any longer.
Tag: Halloween
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South Korea approves probe into deadly Halloween crush in 2022, which claimed 159 lives
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Head of Seoul police accused of tragic Halloween crush
The leader of the police in Seoul has been accused of not doing his job after a Halloween accident that killed 159 young people in South Korea.
Kim Kwang-ho is the top police officer who has been accused in connection to the tragedy, as reported by the local news.
He is being blamed for not having enough police officers in Itaewon, central Seoul, on October 29, 2022.
Over 100,000 people were in that place that night.
Some of the families of the victims are glad that someone was charged, but they think it should have been done sooner.
Mr Kim, who is in charge of the Seoul Police, was not working on 29 October when something bad happened. He was at home.
Authorities say that 137 police officers were sent to Itaewon that night.
There were a lot more young people in the Itaewon entertainment district than there were police officers.
Something seemed wrong in 2022 just after 6:30 pm, a few hours before the deadly crowd accident happened in a side street.
Most of the people who died that night were in their twenties.
In January 2023, a report said that city and emergency responders did not plan well and did not respond to emergencies correctly.
It was found that nothing was done to prevent the emergency, and the right actions were not taken after people asked for help.
Investigators also said that because people didn’t understand what was happening, they didn’t share information on time and different groups didn’t work together.
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Itaewon crush: ‘It could have been me’
When Jessica Yeto visited South Korea for a two-week trip with her friends, it was supposed to be the holiday they’d dreamed of for four years.
But the 29-year-old was caught up in the deadly Halloween crush, in capital city Seoul, which claimed the lives of 156 people.
“The moment that it hit home was when my mum called me,” she says.
“And I could hear the relief in her voice that she heard my voice and I was OK.”
“I just thought the idea that if I’d gone on holiday and not made it back, just what that would have done?”Jessica, who spoke to BBC Newsbeat after returning home to London, was among thousands of young people who converged in Itaewon on Saturday.
She and a group of friends could see “many people in their costumes” in the centre of Seoul, she says.
“Everybody was excited, having fun ready to go out. And the trains were packed.”
Jessica describes being one of the hundreds leaving the station with “quite a delay getting up and out into the streets”.
“But once we did, you could just see everybody having fun, screaming and laughing.”
Jessica’s group briefly pulled away from the crowds so her friend could use the toilet.
“We’re excited, admiring everyone’s costumes, and then slowly you could sort of see everything started to escalate quite quickly,” she says.
“From it being very calm and happy to seeing a person being pulled away in a gurney.
“And that’s when we started to realise something might have happened.”
‘We could have been involved’
Jessica and her friends thought it was “maybe someone drunk or passed out” but not that there was “imminent danger or that lots of people were hurt”.
About 10 minutes later, she saw “CPR being performed” on people.
“There were maybe five or 10 people on the floor. And people were starting to crowd around.”
In the chaos, Jessica received alerts on her phone, but in Korean, so couldn’t understand what it was about.
Things “suddenly went full speed”, she says, into people being pulled onto the floor.
“And you can see people crying. My friend said she spotted someone who had left the toilet, in the group of people on the floor.”
“If she hadn’t had gone to the toilet, we would have been further along in the street, and could have been involved in the crush.”
Jessica feels authorities could have better anticipated crowds “because the streets are quite steep”.
Police chief Yoon Hee-keun says he feels a “heavy responsibility” following the disaster
As a “frequent concert and festival goer”, Jessica says she will be more cautious when attending big events in future.
“I think this has shown me not to take for granted some of the precautions that are in place,” she says.
“You just go out sometimes and you forget that things have to be prepared. And they’re done in the background, so you don’t really pay attention to it. But they are done for your safety,” she says.
“It’s definitely going to teach me to be more aware and vigilant, and maybe not so relaxed with such large crowds.”
But despite being caught up in a terrible tragedy, Jessica is not put off from going back.
“It happened at the end of my trip. So there are definitely lots of parts that I really enjoyed, and parts of the country that I think are really beautiful,” she adds.
Source: BBC.com
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3 children among 14 injured in Halloween drive-by shooting in Chicago
As many as 14 people, including three children, were wounded in a drive-by shooting on Chicago’s Garfield Park neighborhood on Monday night.
The Chicago Tribune reports the incident occurred around 9:30 p.m., when a person opened fire from an SUV into a crowd of people who were standing on the corner of South California Avenue and West Polk Street.
According to officials, a three-year-old boy, an 11-year-old girl and a 13-year-old boy were among those shot, with the rest of the victims being adults between the ages of 30 and 50. Police said the three children are in “serious condition,” while another two adults were transported to local hospitals in critical condition.
“We have reported at least up to 14 people shot,” Superintendent David Brown told reporters. “They’re all in various conditions, between critical and non-life-threatening. We also have a person struck by a vehicle at the scene as well.”
As of Tuesday afternoon, the shooting remains under investigation, with no one in custody.
“Last night, terror touched the lives of 14 individuals, including three children, in another tragic display of gun violence by cowards indiscriminately shooting into a crowd,” Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said in an official statement on Tuesday.
“The shooters had no concerns for the lives of the adults and children impacted, but I am calling on people of goodwill who have information, to come forward. None of us can be silent when faced with this kind of tragedy.”
Source: Complex.com
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Itaewon crush: Five friends went out for Halloween; only two came home
Seoul’s funeral homes are now filled with the bodies of young people and their heartbroken parents. At the end of a long corridor, Mr Sim and his wife sit crumpled on a small sofa, unable to lift their heads.
Inside one of the rooms is the body of their son, 28-year-old James Sim. In the room next door is James’ friend Yoon. And in a funeral home across the city lies James’ girlfriend.
They had gone to Itaewon together on Saturday night with two other friends to celebrate Halloween. James had organised the evening. “He was always the organiser, as he loved nights out with his friends,” his mother says.
James was one of 155 people who died in the crowd crush as a narrow bar-lined alleyway became dangerously overcrowded. The first sign something had gone wrong came when his parents – like many others – awoke to find their son’s bed empty. James’ father got his friends to call him. The police answered.
As they got caught in the deadly crush, two of the friends managed to claw their way through the crowd and up onto some railings at the edge of the alleyway. James, his girlfriend, and Yoon couldn’t make it out.
James loved to exercise, and spent most of his spare time in the gym, lifting weights to bulk up, his mother says. She can’t understand how this did not save him.
James’ relationship was getting serious, his father says. He and his girlfriend would have married soon – if they had survived. He worked as a plumber, a job he did diligently, but his passions were skiing and surfing. His mother’s eyes crease with a flicker of joy as she recounts what he loved to do, but his father’s close and tears fall.
“James was the best older brother,” he recalls. “How is my younger son going to cope without him?
James’ parents are not yet ready to blame anyone for the tragedy In the room, next to his coffin, sit half a dozen of his old schoolfriends. Park Ju-sung has known him the longest, since they were eight.
“I was such a shy child,” Ju-sung says, “James was my only friend. He invited me to everything and encouraged me to take up taekwondo with him. He helped me become more outgoing.”
James’ friend Yoon, whose coffin is in the next room, was grown-up beyond his 28 years and comfortable in his own company. He loved exploring. In the evenings, he used to go to bars alone and try to speak to foreigners so he could learn foreign languages, says Jung-su, who says he admired his confidence.
More than half the victims were in their 20s and the trauma is being felt across this generation. This is the second disaster they have lived through. In 2014, 250 high school students died when a ferry sank off the southwest coast of the country. The high school students would have been in their 20s now.
Investigators are piecing together what happened
At a large public altar, set up in the centre of Seoul, people gathered to mourn. Nineteen-year-old Kim Dae-hui laid a single white chrysanthemum, Korea’s flower of mourning, in tribute to his friend Raghu Jordagan, who was 21.
He had moved to South Korea from Malaysia in January 2021. The pair had become friends after Raghu approached him on the street to compliment his style. He worked in construction to earn money for his family back home, but he was creative at heart and dreamed of being a fashion designer, said Dae-hui.
They would hang out and listen to hip hop music and swap fashion tips. They were teaching each other their languages. “Raghu was more patient than me, he never got annoyed,” Dae-hi remembered, removing his glasses to allow his face to sink into his hands.
Raghu had video-called him from the alley as the crush started. He was next to a young woman who was struggling to breathe. They stayed on the phone as Raghu tried to figure out how to escape. Then the woman’s hand went cold and Raghu hung up. This was the last Dae-hui heard from him.
Image caption, Kim Dae-hui saw his friend Raghu on social media videos from the crush The next morning, he looked through the videos being shared on social media and saw the face of his friend in the crowd, pale and distressed. He convinced himself it wasn’t Rahgu, just someone similar looking. Then the police called. It seemed he had been pushed and trampled on, they said.
Learning the names and the stories of the dead is making this tragedy even harder for people here to comprehend. They need answers, putting authorities under increasing pressure to establish exactly what went wrong and who is accountable.
James’ parents are not ready to blame. “Our son was pushed, and he died. It was an accident. We have not thought who was responsible. We cannot think. All we can do is cry.”
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After a fatal crowd crush, South Korea guarantees a ‘thorough’ investigation
Mourners pay their respects as 154 people are confirmed dead in the Seoul disaster, which occurred during Halloween celebrations.
South Korean Prime Minister Han Duck-soo has promised a thorough investigation into the weekend Halloween crush in Seoul, which killed more than 150 people and plunged the country into mourning.
Officials announced on Monday that the death toll had risen to 154, with 149 people injured, 33 of whom were in critical condition.
Tens of thousands of people crowded into the narrow streets and alleyways of Seoul’s popular Itaewon district on Saturday for the first major Halloween festivities since the COVID-19 pandemic struck three years ago.
Many of the revellers were in their teens and dressed in Halloween costumes.
But chaos erupted when people poured into one particularly narrow and sloping alley, even after it was already packed, witnesses said.
On Monday morning, people laid white chrysanthemums, drinks, and candles outside an exit of the Itaewon metro station, a few steps away from the site of the crush.
“It doesn’t matter how they died, or why they died. Those poor people, all at similar ages to my grandchildren, they died anyway,” said Jung Si-hoon, a retiree and a church elder, who placed an old wooden cross at the makeshift altar.
“What more should we say? We should pray for them and wish them to rest in peace.”
Shops and cafés nearby were closed, and police cordoned off the site of the tragedy as they continued their investigations.
Schools, kindergartens, and companies around the country scrapped planned Halloween events. K-pop concerts and government briefings were also cancelled.
“The government will undertake a thorough investigation into what caused this accident and do its best to make necessary institutional changes so that such an accident is not repeated,” Prime Minister Han said as government officials met on the disaster.
“Identification has been completed for all of the 154 deceased except one, and I believe it is time for follow-up measures such as funeral procedures to be carried out in earnest,” Han said. “We will do our best to provide necessary support by reflecting the opinions of the bereaved families as much as possible.”
South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol and his wife, Kim Keon-hee, were among those paying their respects at a memorial altar set up outside Seoul city hall [Yonhap via Reuters] President Yoon Suk-yeol, who has declared a period of national mourning and designated Itaewon a disaster zone, visited a memorial altar outside the Seoul city hall with his wife on Monday to pay his respects to those who died. Former United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was also among those expressing their condolences.
The crush of partygoers came as Itaewon, a symbol of freewheeling nightlife in the South Korean capital for decades, was beginning to recover from prolonged pandemic restrictions with new restaurants and shops opening.
The disaster is the worst in South Korea since the Sewol ferry sank in 2014, killing 304 people, most of them high school students.
The sinking of the Sewol and criticism of the official response sent shockwaves across South Korea, prompting widespread soul-searching over safety measures that are likely to be renewed in the wake of Saturday’s crush.
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How did Seoul Halloween celebration turn into a deadly crush?
Live streams and videos from social media provide extra detail as to how a Halloween celebration turned disastrous in the South Korean capital.
Packed into narrow alleyways lined with bars and clubs, thousands of people travelled to Itaewon, an area of Seoul, for the city’s first Halloween festival since the COVID-19 pandemic.
But as the crowds grew throughout the night to unmanageable levels, the celebration turned disastrous as a crush in one alleyway left at least 154 dead.
Sky News has analysed videos from social media to show how it took just 30 minutes for the situation to spiral out of control.
They also confirm an apparent lack of police or security presence in the build-up to the crush.
Halloween celebrations
The revellers turning up for the celebrations were predominantly young, with many travelling to the area via Itaewon train station.
Some live-streamed videos of their evening on Facebook. The screenshot below, taken from one of these livestreams, shows crowds beginning to form on the main road by the station at 8.10 pm.
The main road is busy, but cars are still able to drive freely and there is still space between people.
Over the following hours, the crowds grow in size. They funnel into a series of small side streets behind the main road around the Hamilton Hotel, highlighted in yellow on the map below. These streets are small and those running north to south slope steeply.
Image:The alleyways, highlighted in yellow, are where the crowds began to build At 10.06 pm, people can be seen in the main alleyway running east to the west still freely moving but slowly. Some people are holding each other to avoid being split up by the crowd as they pass an Irish bar in the background.
Later, 150 metres east of where the footage above was shot, a denser crowd grew on one of the steep and narrow side alleys. People were so close to each other that any small movement rippled through the crowd.
In the footage below pop music is heard blasting out amongst cries of anguish as the packed-in crowd sense danger.
People in this street narrowly avoided disaster. It would be another steep alleyway on the other side of the Hamilton Hotel where the deadly crush would occur, highlighted in dark yellow below.
Image:The alleyway west of the Hamilton Hotel, highlighted here, was where the crush occurred This short video shows this alleyway west of the hotel earlier in the evening. The crowd is spread wall to wall across the narrow passageway – which sits on a 20% gradient – with no escape routes.
Be careful ! #itaewon pic.twitter.com/tuEaPelXqQ
— ᗰᗩᖇIᗴ (@marmeyr) October 29, 2022
Around the corner, Janelle Story, an eyewitness who spoke to Sky News, filmed her view as the crowd surged. This video was captured at 10.34 pm.
The story told Sky News: “Very suddenly this wave of people just came rushing towards us with this incredible force and urgency, and at the moment I stopped filming because it got really serious and scary.”
She was 40 metres from the western alleyway by the Hamilton Hotel where a crush was occurring. By matching the building exterior with existing imagery from Google Streetview, Sky News confirmed the footage was taken outside the Irish bar seen in the earlier video at 10.06 pm.
In less than half an hour, a busy but free-flowing crowd had turned dangerous.
Image:The eyewitness video (right) can be located by matching the front of the bar with existing imagery from Google Maps (left) By 10.45 pm it became clear something was very wrong. Livestreams from the main road show ambulances and emergency personnel heading toward the Hamilton Hotel.
In the surrounding crowds, it also began to dawn on people a serious incident had occurred. One young man had been live-streaming the party on the street with his friends having fun. As they moved towards the Hamilton Hotel, the mood changed.
At 11.15 pm he filmed the crowd parting the way as paramedics moved through with patients on stretchers.
Image:A stretcher-bearer carries an injured person through the crowd on the main east-west alleyway The video below shows the scene that the emergency services were heading from. A surge had forced the crowd to fall over, likely made worse by the steepness of the alleyway.
Emergency workers can be seen trying to free those caught in the crush. People try climbing the walls in an attempt to escape, whilst those on a small set of stairs leading to a side door into the hotel try to lift people to safety.
Reports suggested some people were trapped for over an hour. Other videos posted online show paramedics and members of the public attempting CPR in the moments after the surge. These videos are too distressing to share.
In the immediate build-up to the crush, few police officers or security personnel can be seen in the busy alleys on the livestreams analysed by Sky News. Questions are now being asked of the authorities’ management of the situation.
Source: Skynews.com -
Spooky movies to get you in the Halloween spirit
Halloween entertainment is serving major nostalgia this year, with some of our favorite spooky classics being remade, or better yet, getting a sequel.
Check out these holiday classics that will certainly leave you a little frightened.
The Sanderson Sisters are back! “Hocus Pocus 2” brings back Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kathy Najimy as your favorite witches to get you ready for Halloween. The original film came out in 1993 and immediately became a family classic set.
The movie is streaming on Disney+.
“Tell me your name, I’ll tell you mine.” Let’s take it back to one of the best scary movies ever made. It’s a deadly game and one masked man is wreaking havoc all over town. The film, made in 1996, stars Drew Barrymore, David Arquette, Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox and Rose McGowan.
You can stream “Scream” on Paramount Plus.
Forty-four years and 13 movies later, “Halloween Ends” is back to give you a fright. It is said to be the end of this latest trilogy in the franchise, featuring Jamie Lee Curtis, who starred in the original “Halloween” in 1978. The movie tells the story of a man named Michael Myers who escapes an insane asylum. He’s on the hunt to kill his sister, played by Curtis, and brutally murders everyone in his path.
The movie is in theaters Friday.
Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice!!! Forget the scaries and insert some giggles. “Beetlejuice” has been a fan favorite since its debut in 1988. Starring Michael Keaton as Beetlejuice, it tells the story of a dead couple who haunt their house and the new people living in it. The movies also stars Alec Baldwin, Winona Ryder and Geena Davis.
“Beetlejuice” is streaming on HBO Max.
“Hellraiser” is said to be a “reimagining” of Clive Barker’s 1987 horror film. CNN’s film critic, Brian Lowry says in his review that the film tells the story of a young woman, Riley (Odessa A’zion of Netflix’s “Grand Army”), who is “struggling with addiction and winds up stealing from the wrong storage facility, thrusting her and those around her (including her brother) into peril and creating incentive for her to decipher what might be happening.”
The film is streaming on Hulu.
Who doesn’t love a Brad Pitt movie?! Throw in Tom Cruise, Kirsten Dunst, Christian Slater, some vampires and you’ve got yourself a Halloween cult classic. Adapted from Anne Rice’s novel, it tells the story of how two vampires, played by Pitt and Cruise, turn Dunst’s character into a vampire.
It received Oscar nominations and has lived on to haunt movie watchers ever since.
The film is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
In “Practical Magic,” Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman play two sisters who have always known they were different because they are witches. Their aunts raised them and taught them magic but they grow up to learn that they are cursed. Every man they fall in love with ends up dying a tragic death. They must use their powers to try and break this curse once and for all and find their one true love.
It is streaming on HBO Max.
Source:CNN
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Seoul Halloween: Almost everyone who died in the Seoul crush has been identified, police says
The identities of nearly all those killed in an apparent crowd surge in Seoul’s popular nightclub district Itaewon on Saturday have been confirmed, according to Seoul Metropolitan Police. Police confirmed the identities of 150 people killed on Sunday, according to CNN.
The disaster claimed the lives of 153 people.
The three unidentified bodies are all young women whose nationalities have yet to be confirmed, they added.
The Seoul Metropolitan Government had said they had received 4,024 missing person reports as of 5 p.m. local time (4 a.m. ET), though some of these reports could relate to the same people.
Police said there is no active search for those reported missing as they believe no one went missing from the scene. They said thousands of missing person reports have been used to help identify those killed in the incident.
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Mother argues daycare workers involved in Halloween Mask incident should get jail time
In one parent’s opinion, the since-fired daycare workers at the center of the ongoing Halloween mask controversy should do time in jail.
Katelyn Johnson, who says her two-year-old was among those scared when a daycare worker in Mississippi donned a Scream-inspired mask, was interviewed by TMZ over the weekend. According to Johnson, her child has exhibited potty-training “regression” following the series of mask-focused incidents.
“I do feel a felony is appropriate,” Johnson, wearing an ‘’I Back the Blue” shirt and stationed in front of an apparent piece of police-promoting wall decor, said. “There was inadequate supervision. They were traumatizing those children and some of those children are old enough to communicate and talk through those feelings and some of ‘em aren’t. And there is no telling with those children being so young when we will see that trauma surface. My son is two years old and he cannot communicate what is going on through his head. He can only tell me through reaction.”
Johnson added that her son has shown a “very strong reaction” to the specific mask used in the widely shared footage, speculating that this level of reaction is due to the alleged frequency of the mask’s usage.
“I would like to see them serve some jail time,” Johnson said, later clarifying that she would want to see those involved serving “anywhere from six months to a year” behind bars.
As previously reported, the masktroversy took off in response to footage captured at Lil’ Blessings Child Care and Learning Center in Hamilton. Local law enforcement announced last week that Sierra McCandless, Oci-Anna Kilburn, Jennifer Newman, and Shyenne Mills were each facing multiple counts of felony child abuse. Traci Hutson, meanwhile, is facing failure to report abuse by a mandatory reporter and simple assault charges.
In a statement shared with Complex via email last week, a rep from the Mississippi State Department of Health confirmed it had finished its investigation into the Lil’ Blessings controversy and passed its findings to the agency attorney.
“The facility remains closed at this time,” the rep added.
Source: Complex.com -
12,000 fentanyl pills disguised as Candy Seized at Los Angeles Airport
As Halloween approaches, parents are being warned that fentanyl pills could be mixed with candy.
ABC7 reports a traveler tried to get around 12,000 fentanyl pills through airport security on Wednesday morning. The drugs were housed in Skittles, Whoppers, and SweeTarts packages. Initially the suspect got away, but was later identified.
“The suspect fled prior to being detained by law enforcement but has been identified and the investigation is on-going,” the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration said in a statement, per CNN. The DEA and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department both made the bust as part of a task force at the airport.
Authorities are warning parents about fentanyl that’s also being made in rainbow colors and placed in candy wrappers. The colorful pills are a “deliberate effort by drug traffickers to drive addiction amongst kids and young adults,” DEA Administrator Anne Milgram said. The “rainbow fentanyl” was discovered in August and has been found across the U.S.
“With Halloween approaching, parents need to make sure they are checking their kids candy and not allowing them to eat anything until it has been inspected by them,” the Sheriff’s Department said.
“If you find anything in candy boxes that you believe might be narcotics, do not touch it and immediately notify your local law enforcement agency.”In early October, the DEA came across a woman carrying 15,000 rainbow-colored fentanyl pills inside a Lego box in what is thought to be the largest bust of fentanyl ever in New York City.
Source: Complex.com
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‘Halloween Ends’ debuts Atop domestic Box Office with $41 Million
Halloween Ends earned $41.3 million to finish atop the domestic box office in its opening weekend, Variety reports.
Billed as the final showdown between Laurie Strode, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, and Michael Myers, the latest installment in the Halloween franchise became the first film since Jordan Peele’s Nope to debut above the $40 million mark.
Even though projections were between $50 million to $55 million, the follow-up to last year’s Halloween Kills managed to pull in a respectable sum while also being simultaneously released on the Peacock streaming service.
“The day-and-date model was put to the test again, but I think this is a mandate in favor of the movie theater,” Comscore senior media analyst Paul Dergarabedian said, per AP. “Audiences had the option to watch it at home but they chose to go to the theater.”
According to NBCUniversal, Halloween Ends became the most-watched series or film of all time over a two-day period on Peacock. The movie amassed an additional $17.17 million internationally to push its worldwide box office to $58.42 million.
Elsewhere, Smile continues to be a surprise hit for Paramount.
With a production cost of $17 million, the horror flick has pushed its domestic haul to $71.1 million and $137 million worldwide in just its third week. Dergarabedian mentioned that having two R-rated horror films atop the domestic box office doesn’t happen all that often.
Source: Complex.com