Halloween Kills, the 12th installment in the horror franchise, slashed its way to top of the North American box office this weekend, exceeding film industry expectations and raking in $50 million more.
NBC News and the distributor of the movie, Universal Pictures, are both units of NBCUniversal. '' We should never underestimate the horror genre, said Paul Dergarabedian, a senior media analyst at Comscore, which tracks box office data. It's the same kind of movie genre that came out in 1996, but now it is getting respect. Although Halloween Kills did not impress Rotten Tomatoes, it earned a lackluster 39 percent score on Decks.
Dergarabedian said that the horror movies have ginned up about half a billion dollars in box-office revenue since 20 March. The main movie chains of Quiet Place Part II, Candyman and the latest chapter in the Conjuring franchise each gave a boost this year to film chains.
In recent years, domestic movies have generally performed well in the horror film market. Halloween Kills capitalized on broad awareness of a movie series that began with John Carpenter's chilling Halloween in 1978 — and arrived just one week before Americans celebrate the holiday of the title.
Dergarabedian said the success of Halloween Kills reacted to expectations that the option to watch the movie online would cannibalize revenues at traditional theaters.
There is nothing like seeing horror with other people at a theater, Dergarabedian said.
Furthermore, the weekend's second major new release — Ridley Scott's The Last Duel, starring Adam Driver and Matt Damon — was scraped at the North American box office, bombing just under $5 million in ticket sales, according to Box Office Mojo.
The failure of The Last Duel, a serious historical drama that deals with the fallout of a sexual assault, points to one of the key difficulties facing Hollywood at this chapter in the pandemic: older audiences are thought to gravitate towards somber fare are largely staying away from theaters.
Dergarabedian pointed out that robust grosses for several recent hits — Halloween Kills, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, Marvel's Shang-Chi and Free Guy were fueled by male audiences, especially younger teenagers.