Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu remake is off to a very impressive start at the box office.
The gothic horror remake of the silent vampire classic opened with $40.3M domestically and $3M overseas from just 5 markets, for a worldwide total of $43.3M. The movie has a reported production budget of $50M.
This marks the second-biggest opening for an R-rated horror film in 2024 behind Alien: Romulus, and the movie has already become Eggers’ top-grossing domestic release to date.
Though some critics weren't quite as enamoured with Nosferatu as others, the movie is holding strong at 86% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 218 reviews.
Despite one image of the vampire recently leaking online, the marketing ploy of keeping Bill Skarsgård's take on Count Orlok under wraps clearly paid off.
Eggers revealed his thought process behind the vampire's look during a recent interview with Deadline.
“What would a dead Transylvanian nobleman actually look like? That was basically where I started from, and I wanted to still acknowledge Max Schreck’s makeup design.”
As for Skarsgård, while he would ultimately get used to the design, he was far from convinced upon first seeing the prosthetics he'd be required to wear.
“Bill sees the sculpt of the bust and he freaks out, and he’s like, ‘That doesn’t look anything like me, this guy didn’t look like me when he was even alive,'" recalls Eggers. "'What the f*ck?’ He wasn’t mean, but he was alarmed. And I was like, ‘Well, that’s the point, that you’re totally transforming into somebody else.’ And then, he’s putting the makeup on and he’s like, ‘Ugh, I look like a goblin. This is terrible.’ And then, once they put the hair on, even though the makeup wasn’t totally finished, I saw the first moment when he was like, ‘OK, this is cool. This is a person.’ I started to see him in the mirror, playing around, trying to do something."
A new take on F. W. Murnau's 1922 version and Werner Herzog's take in 1979, Nosferatu is a gothic tale of obsession between a haunted young woman and the terrifying vampire infatuated with her, causing untold horror in its wake.
Written for the screen and directed by Robert Eggers, Nosferatu stars Bill Skarsgård, Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin, Ralph Ineson, Simon McBurney and Willem Dafoe.
Nosferatu is now playing in theaters in the US, and opens in The UK and Ireland on January 1.