A movie about a demonic orange unicorn from a 1990s kids' show just embarrassed its own tracking. Buddy, the feature directing debut from Too Many Cooks creator Casper Kelly, has taken an estimated $5,531,024 domestically in its opening weekend per Box Office Mojo. Pre-weekend tracking had it somewhere around $2.5 to $3 million.
It did that on 1,258 screens. Roughly a third of the footprint a studio hands a typical wide release. That works out to about $4,397 per screen.
The film opened Friday, August 28th, co-distributed by Roadside Attractions and Saban Films. Kelly directs from his own script, with Cristin Milioti, Patton Oswalt, Michael Shannon, and Topher Grace in the cast, and Keegan-Michael Key voicing the title creature.
Roadside and Saban put out a joint statement calling the weekend a record on three fronts: Roadside's second-biggest opening ever, Saban's biggest in the company's twelve years, and the best 2026 opening for any film playing on fewer than 1,800 screens.
Why does a $5 million weekend deserve a story at all, in a year where horror movies have been opening to ten times that? Per-screen average. That number tracks how badly people wanted to see it, not how many theaters happened to be showing it. Buddy's roughly $4,397 cleared what wide releases in the same window managed with three times the screens.
Rue Morgue lined it up against the 2026 field: Luc Besson's Dracula opened to $4.4 million across 2,050 theaters, Clown in a Cornfield to $3.6 million on 2,277, and Late Night with the Devil to $2.8 million on 1,034. Buddy out-grossed all three from a smaller platform.
That's a different story from the one we told when Blumhouse and Atomic Monster crossed a billion dollars for the year. That was the big studios proving cheap horror on thousands of screens still print money. This is the small end of the same business, where a weird movie with no franchise behind it has to win people over one theater at a time.
It helps that horror fans already knew who Kelly was. Too Many Cooks aired on Adult Swim at four in the morning in 2014 and freaked out everyone who stumbled onto it. He also wrote the Cheddar Goblin commercial in Mandy and co-created Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell.
The distributors' statement credited "its authenticity and its gonzo, WTF horror-comedy-thriller combination."
The real test will come next weekend. Openings this far ahead of tracking tend to be front-loaded with the people who were always going to show up, and horror comedies live or die on whether anyone else follows them in. Hold the drop under 50 percent and Roadside and Saban could have room to expand it into September.
Did you catch Buddy this weekend, and does it hold up to the hype?
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