Halloween easily won the box office this weekend, nearly matching the October all-time record set by Venom just a couple weeks ago. After a relatively slow September, the marketplace got a shot in the arm when the calendar flipped over and Venom and A Star is Born premiered in theaters. Both highly-anticipated films performed well commercially, with the former even rewriting the record books. They’ve held strongly over the early course of their respective runs, but their time at the top of the charts was about to come to an end.
Premiering Friday, David Gordon Green’s Halloween was poised to become a bona fide phenomenon. It was a foregone conclusion it would shatter the franchise’s all-time opening weekend record, but there were some estimates that had it equalling Venom. The horror hit didn’t quite get there, but it still had a tremendous debut.
Per Box Office Mojo, Halloween earned $77.5 million in its first three days. After a single weekend, it’s already the highest-grossing installment in the series, nearly $20 million ahead of 2007’s Halloween. It’s also the biggest opening weekend in Blumhouse’s history, besting Paranormal Activity 3’s $52.5 million.
With a global gross of $91.8 million, Halloween has already turned a massive profit for the studio. In keeping with Blumhouse’s trademark brand of horror, the legacy sequel cost a measly $10 million to make, meaning it needed to hit around $20 million worldwide to break even. Even though horror movies tend to be front-loaded, Halloween is almost definitely going to stick around for the next few weeks and have an extremely lucrative performance thanks to positive word-of-mouth. It’s all but a guarantee Blumhouse moves forward with the planned sequel now, which they reportedly want to get out in time for next October. Demand for a new Halloween was certainly inflated given the gap between entires, but it’s clear there’s still interest in this particular brand.
Since Halloween was the genre movie of choice, the two-time reigning champion Venom fell to third with $18.1 million in its third weekend. The comic book adaptation raised its domestic total to $171.1 million. A Star is Born continued to dominate as the counter-programming option for older moviegoers, bringing in $19.3 million to increase its total to $126.3 million. The rest of the top five was rounded out by Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween ($9.7 million) and the Neil Armstrong biopic First Man ($8.5 million). Universal was hopeful their awards contender could rebound and have a lengthy run, but that seems highly unlikely now.
More: Halloween’s After-Credits Tease Explained
Source: Box Office Mojo
- Halloween Release Date: 2018-10-19
