'The Possession' Surprise Box Office Winner As 'Oogieloves' Plummets

This weekend's box office takings in the US and Canada told a tale of two films, with one, 'The Possession', taking a surprisingly large amount of the revenue to place top of the pile, and another facing the ignominy of having the lowest grossing weekend for a film opening in 2,000 or more cinemas.

To the good first then, and The Possession took a perhaps surprising top spot at the box office, with the supernatural thriller taking modest figures of $21.3 million. The story concerns a young woman being inhabited by a demon, but there were no demons to be had for the bosses behind it as they beat out second place Lawless - the one that's currently got Shia LaBeouf all over the press for his controversial method acting - by almost $8 million. Lawless took $13 million.

So which film flunked? The dubious honour goes to family flick Oogieloves which took in a miserable $445,000 through its first three days on general release. That figure rose to an estimated $602,000 yesterday, but it's still a woeful return that placed it 29th on this weekend's table. There's good news for Hollywood in general though, with 2012 film sales in North America now four per cent up on this time last year, with total takings of $7.6 billion.