Horror at the Box Office: 5 Genre Films in the Top Ten
Horror movies comprised half the top ten this past weekend, but the steep competition prevented them from achieving high earnings. The top grossing genre flick was They Will Kill You, which grossed $5 million domestically and finished in third place overall. It’s made approximately $9 million worldwide. The $20 million budget horror action film has received decent reviews, but isn’t an overwhelming critical or audience favorite.
This is a mediocre opening weekend. Warner Bros was surely hoping for better. As I mentioned last week, I’m not sure why they scheduled this to come out right after Ready or Not 2. I haven’t seen it, but based on the ads, this looks very similar to a Ready or Not premise. With theater tickets being so expensive these days, most folks aren’t going to shell out money for two similar films in consecutive weekends.
Speaking of Ready or Not, the sequel finished in sixth place this week with a domestic gross of an estimated four million dollars. That’s a 55% decline from its opening weekend, which is a pretty standard drop for a horror film. Ready or Not 2 has grossed $16 million in North America and $23 million worldwide. The original finished with around $57 million worldwide and the sequel may end up in similar territory.
Scream 7 finished in seventh place with an estimated $2.6 million. The big news for the franchise is that part 7 has surpassed $200 million worldwide. It’s the first Scream film to do so. This is somewhat misleading due to the higher ticket prices of today, but it’s still an impressive milestone.
It’s a show of strength for a top tier horror franchise to earn this much despite so much negativity and controversy surrounding the film. This emphasizes the difference between the heavyweights of the horror world and the ones with devoted but much smaller followings, like Ready or Not and 28 Days Later.
Undertone finished ninth with $1.6 million in its third weekend, increasing its domestic total to over $18 million. A24 is making a hefty profit on this one, which cost only half a million to produce (although that doesn’t count costs for distribution, marketing, etc.). Undertone has quietly become one of the genre’s better success stories of the year so far.
Forbidden Fruits opened in tenth place with about $1.2 million. Budget info doesn’t appear to be publicly available, but this is an IFC film, so it probably didn’t cost much. This movie seems like it has Mean Girls cult classic potential but, based on this opener, its theatrical prospects are limited.
Up Next
Next weekend is bereft of new horror films, which undoubtedly comes as a relief to the glut of movies currently competing with each other in theaters. The next major release is the heavily promoted Faces of Death. This movie takes its name from the notorious shockumentary from 1978.
The ’26 version is about a website moderator who comes across a series of disturbing snuff videos. The ads have played up how shocking the movie supposedly is. We’ll see if that translates into big box office bucks.
Credit to Box Office Mojo for the figures cited.
