PROJECTIONS: As reported by Billboard, Halloween pulled in $33.3 million from 3,928 theaters. Projections have the film amassing $80 million by the close of the weekend, which would place Halloween in a tie for the best October movie opening weekend. The record of $80 million was just set two weeks ago by Venom. October is known for being a slow month at the box office, but Venom and Halloween helped breathe life into the dormant sales.
Danny Leiner, who directed the popular slacker comedies Dude, Where’s My Car? and Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, has died. He was 57. Leiner died Thursday at his home in Los Angeles after a long battle with cancer, his brother, Ken, told The Hollywood Reporter.
DATELINE A CALIFORNIA FARM: Kings County Sheriff’s Office, California, received an unusual call on October 18 from a walnut farmer who claimed to have found a strange, large metal object of unknown origin that had smashed into his orchard, local news outlet Kron4 reported, citing the sheriff’s office. When officers arrived at the site, they found a helmet-like, charred, metallic object and assumed that it was part of a satellite.
A small space rock made an extremely close approach yesterday (October 19, 2018). The close flyby of Asteroid 2018 UA occurred just hours after being detected by the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona. Limited observations did not allow for precise trajectory calculations, but estimates suggest the small asteroid passed at a distance between 4,536 miles to 9,540 miles (7,300 km to 15,353 km) from Earth’s surface. For comparison, meteorological and television satellites orbit at some 22,300 miles (35,888 km) from our planet’s surface, which means the asteroid’s approach was one of the closest registered.