This has been a strange summer for horror at the box office, and the strangest part is who came out on top. The audience didn't reward the biggest brand or the widest release. They lined up for the movies nobody saw coming. Two original horror films with no franchise behind them ran up enormous numbers, and then a fifth entry in one of the most beloved horror series ever made opened to a fraction of what everyone expected. If you want the season in one sentence: originality beat the machine.
And this is coming from someone that was raised on horror films in the 80s. I still remember hiding behind the couch while my parents watched Raimi's original Evil Dead on VHS and being scared out of my mind. Heck, my twin brother and I still get together to watch Army of Darkness and recite all of Bruce Campbell's great one-liners.
Let's start with the film that stumbled. Evil Dead Burn opened to just $13.7 million domestically in its debut weekend, with a soft worldwide start to go with it. That's well under both of its recent predecessors. Evil Dead (2013) opened to $25.8 million on its way to $54 million domestic and nearly $100 million worldwide. Its 2023 sequel, Evil Dead Rise, bowed to $24.5 million and rode strong buzz to $67 million domestic and more than $147 million worldwide. In other words, Burn opened to barely half of what either preceding film managed out of the gate.
And this wasn't a bad movie getting what it deserved. Evil Dead Burn landed Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes and, by several accounts, stands as the best-reviewed entry the franchise has ever had.
New Line pushed it hard, too. The relentless trailer campaign, the CinemaCon footage, the tickets-on-sale drumbeat, the works. Good reviews, real marketing muscle, a brand name horror fans have loved for over forty years - and none of it moved the needle.
What Actually Beat It?
The two horror stories that have defined this summer both came out of nowhere. Backrooms, the A24 film built from a viral internet creepypasta and directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons, opened to a staggering $81.5 million domestically and $118 million worldwide. That's the biggest opening in A24's history, off a budget of roughly $10 million. No stars, no sequel number, no established IP most parents had ever heard of, just a scary idea executed well enough that the buzz did the rest.
Then there's Obsession, and its numbers look unreal. Curry Barker made the thing for $750,000. Focus Features bought it out of the festival circuit for $14 million and watched it climb past $400 million worldwide. It's the highest-grossing original horror film of the century. It's now a global phenomenon.
Put those next to a $13.7 million opening for a legacy franchise sequel and the pattern is hard to miss. This year, horror audiences turned out in droves for brand-new stories and shrugged at a familiar one, even a good one. Original ideas outran the franchise machine by a margin too wide to be a fluke.
Why Did Burn Stall?
Franchise fatigue is real. Burn is the fifth Evil Dead film across more than forty years, with no Ash, no returning face, and no Bruce Campbell to anchor it for the faithful.
Release timing may have worked against it too. Drop a hard-R gorefest into a summer where horror fans already emptied their wallets on Backrooms and Obsession, and their appetites were satiated. That R rating carries its own ceiling, as well. Burn was reviewed as almost unbearably brutal, which thrills the hardcore horror fans, but tends to scare off those that might just be curious.
All of that is true, but it doesn't fully explain numbers coming in so low for a film that was reviewed so well. Not to mention the big marketing push. The reviews were there, the awareness was there, but the audience chose to spend their money and time on something else.
Either way, the takeaway for the genre is bigger than one weekend. If a $750,000 movie can gross $400 million, while a legacy brand with great reviews can open to $13.7 million, the old assumption that a known name is the safe bet may no longer be true. The next horror greenlight meeting should be an interesting one.
What do you think, horror fans? Did Evil Dead Burn get a raw deal, or are original stories simply where the genre is headed now?
Sound off in the comments below!
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