Horror at the Box Office: A Quiet Weekend
I wish I had more exciting news, but this was a meh weekend at the box office for horror. There were no new genre releases and none of the holdovers finished in the top five.
The highest ranking horror film was They Will Kill You, which finished in seventh place with $1.93 million, a 61% drop from its opening weekend. It’s grossed a total of about $8.7 million domestically and $15 million worldwide on a $20 million budget. Warner Bros isn’t going to make a theatrical profit on this film, especially after marketing and distribution costs are factored in.
Ready or Not 2: Here I Come came in ninth with $1.8 million. It’s earned a little over $20 million domestically so far. The sequel has made about $33 million worldwide on a $14 million budget. That’s a respectable performance, but I’m skeptical that it is impressive enough to warrant a third film. It will probably depend on how popular it is on streaming platforms.
Undertone finished in tenth place with a little over $1 million earned. It’s grossed over $19 million on a budget of less than a million. This is a nice little hit for A24, which really struggled with its horror releases last year.
Scream 7 finally dropped out of the top ten, finishing 11th with $915K. It’s earned over $120 million in North America and will likely be disappearing from theaters soon. It’s already available to stream. Early plans for Scream 8 are currently underway.
Forbidden Fruits tanked with an 83% drop in its second weekend and landed in 15th place. It’s earned about $1.9 million so far and certainly won’t be in theaters much longer. This seems like the type of movie that will perform better on streaming platforms.
Up Next
Shudder’s Faces of Death remake is the big horror release for April 10th. The original Faces of Death (1978) is a controversial shockumentary that purports to show real footage of people dying, although most of it has been exposed as fake. It built a cult following in the ’80s and received several sequels.
The so-called remake is a conventionally shot and scripted film. It will probably be a much better movie than the original (and certainly less tasteless), but is there a substantial appetite for another Faces of Death movie?
The ad campaign is playing up how shocking this movie supposedly is. I’m not sure how effective this marketing strategy will be. It takes a lot to shock modern audiences. People are pretty jaded these days. It’ll be interesting to see how it performs.
Credit to Box Office Mojo for the figures cited.
