Halloween served up a scare for Hollywood, as a host of star-studded awards vehicles and the requisite horror thrillers all flopped at the domestic box office. Sandra Bullock, who plays the lead in and produced political passion project Our Brand is Crisis, saw the lowest wide release opening of her career with just $3.4 million coming from 2,022 theatres. The picture, co-produced by her close friend and Gravity co-star George Clooney and based on a documentary about James Carville’s advisory role in the 2002 Bolivian presidential election, casts Bullock as a female version of the longtime Democratic Party strategist. Its niche subject matter didn’t do the film any favors, and despite Bullock’s strong performance decidedly middling reviews and limited marketing sealed the picture’s fate. Still, in the context of what turned out to be the weakest frame of 2015, those numbers were good enough for 8th place. Bradley Cooper suffered a similarly humiliating opening with his bad-boy chef redemption drama Burnt, directed by John Wells, earning just $5 million from 3,003 locations. The Weinstein Company may have hoped to duplicate the runaway success of Jon Favreau’s 2014 indie kitchen flic Chef, but with these sorts of numbers coming off of a $20 million budget that looks to be all but out of the question. Halloween and horror movies have been inseparable for decades now, but that holiday tradition wasn’t enough to save newcomers Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse and Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension from a ghastly debut. Scouts, a self aware zombie comedy about two nerdy boy scouts, Tye Sheridan and David Koechner, and a humorously beautiful Sarah Dumont fighting off hoards of undead men, women, and animals, netted just $2.6 million in its opening weekend. Christopher Landon, the director, rose to prominence by penning Paranormal Activity 2-5, and will take some extra salt this frame in seeing Ghost Dimension, the sixth installment of the series he nurtured fall to an uncharacteristically low $3.45 million, finishing seventh in its sophomore weekend. Both films were hurt by a partial boycott from national theatre chains in protest of Paramount’s decision to speed up their VOD releases. The studio expects digital sales to make up for the difference in lost show times. The rest of the top ten belonged to a familiar group of hangovers, led by Matt Damon’s The Martian. Now in its fifth week in theatres, and its fourth on top of the domestic chart, Ridley Scott’s latest interplanetary epic has earned a domestic cume of $182 million and is set to surpass Gladiator as the British director’s biggest hit in the U.S. It added $17 million internationally, for a spectacular worldwide total of $428 million. Second place went to Sony’s Goosebumps, which added $10.2 million in its third week to reach a domestic cume of $57.1 million while third went to Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks’s Bridge of Spies as it closed its third week with $8 million to reach a domestic total of $45.2 million. After it’s already disappointing showing last weekend, Vin Diesel’s The Last Witch Hunter finished off its return frame with just $4.7 million, dropping 56% off of its debut. While the North American scene failed to find any fuel for an already flagging October, the international chart was set ablaze by the 24th visit of a familiar beast. Spectre, the latest James Bond film and the second from director Sam Mendes, made $80.5 million in just six markets. $63.5 million came in the UK alone, almost double the previous record set in 2004 by Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. IMAX played a big part in the picture’s success, making up $5 million of Spectre’s revenue in its home market. The rest of its earnings came from Scandinavia, where it found its biggest hit at $4.2 million in Denmark and the Netherlands where it made $3.7 million. Next week, Spectre goes global with the addition of 40 new markets, including the US.. We’ll also see the domestic release of Fox Searchlight’s Spotlight. Lorenzo Soria