‘Paranormal Activity’ = Profitable Activity

A decade ago, a little movie by the name of The Blair Witch Project was released and it proved to be a huge success at the box office. It cost just $60,000 to make and brought in $248.6 million - a whopping return of investment of 414,233 percent.

But Blair Witch’s crown as the most profitable movie of all time has now been snatched from its grasp by Paranormal Activity, a film that has garnered comparisons with its forebear but which cost even less money to produce.

Paranormal Activity was made on a shoestring budget of just $15,000 but has already taken $65.1 million at the U.S. box office. That signifies a RoI of 433,900 percent, and that’s after just two weeks on general release.

Don Harris, executive VP of distribution for Paramount, defended the lack of pushing of the film, with it being allowed to build up steam of its own accord. He told The Wrap:

“Everybody else thought we should be going faster than we were. But I thought we were doing a pretty good job of seeding the ground as we went. I don’t know that we would have done a lot more last weekend if we would have added a bunch of runs then.”

The question now is whether there’ll be a host of low budget copycats released. It didn’t really happen after The Blair Witch Project but with YouTube and social networking now important to the success or failure of movies of all types, the situation is different than a decade ago.