Michael Myers may just celebrate his 61st birthday with an $85 million debut weekend.
Pretty spry for a 61-year-old guy… Ryan Green
Yesterday was Michael Myer’s birthday. I can only hope that I am healthy and strong enough to go on a grisly murder spree when I’m 61. So, kudos to Mr. Myers (or “The Shape” if you’re nasty) for pulling down both a double-digit body count in his latest homecoming and a $33.337 million opening day. Yup, Universal/Comcast Corp., Blumhouse and Miramax’s Halloween, which is a sequel to… uh… Halloween which ignores the prior Halloween sequels, just carved up the biggest opening day ever for the month of October. It’s just above than Venom ’s $32.5m opening day. So the question, to the extent that it matters, is whether the Jamie Lee Curtis/Judy Greer/ Andi Matichak sequel can top Venom ’s record-high $80.2m weekend from just two weeks ago.
The film earned just 23% of its opening day via Thursday previews ($7.7 million), meaning it is, thus far, leggier than The Nun (24%), It (27%), Venom (30%), Paranormal Activity 2 (30%), Paranormal Activity 3 (31%) and Deadpool 2 (35%). So even while the Thursday number was slightly smaller than I anticipated, it merely meant that the film is thus far playing more as a general audiences attraction. Or, optimistically speaking, the folks who saw it on Thursday told their friends that it was worth seeing on Friday. That used to be the point of these advance-night showings before they were a regular part of the release schedule. Whether or not Halloween gets to $80m this weekend, it’s almost certain to break some horror movie records.
Provided it gets past $59 million, it’ll top Hannibal ($58m in 2001, which was the third-biggest opening weekend ever at the time) to be the second-biggest R-rated horror debut behind It ($123m). If it gets past $78m, it’ll top the debut of I Am Legend to be above essentially any scary movie that isn’t It or the Jurassic Park / Jurassic World movies. It’ll be the biggest slasher debut of all time, as it matched Scream 2 ’s $33m Fri-Sun debut (in 1997) on its first day. If it opens above $68m, it’ll be past the inflation-adjusted opening for Scream 2 ($65m adjusted) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula ($32m in 1992/$67m today). A debut above the adjusted opening for Interview with the Vampire ($36m in 1994/$79m adjusted) is possible.
If it plays like The Nun, It or Venom in terms of weekend multipliers (around 2.45x), we’re looking at an over/under $81 million Fri-Sun launch. Yes, it’s possible that it’ll play like Logan (2.67x) and leg it out to $89m for the weekend. Heck, a super frontloaded weekend like (for example) Paranormal Activity 2, Paranormal Activity 3 and Insidious: Chapter 2 still gets this $10m-$15m Blumhouse production to $68m for the weekend. Heck, with a $33m opening day, Halloween could be the most frontloaded movie ever (think One Direction: This is Us) and still pull down a $59m debut weekend and a $106m domestic finish. When you have an under-$20m slasher sequel that just grossed $33m in one day, there really are no “worst-case-scenarios.”
Halloween: H20 played a similar game in 1998, offering essentially manufactured nostalgia (it arrived just three years after Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers) while bringing back Jamie Lee Curtis for a 20-years-later showdown that ignored every sequel after Halloween II. H20 ’s $26m Wed-Sun debut would be around $48m today. The combination of a straight-up sequel to Halloween, executive produced (and scored) by John Carpenter, and produced by Blumhouse, was always a solid sell. Bringing Jamie Lee Curtis back and (again) selling the whole “She’s not a victim this time” thing (I guess we are supposed to forget Halloween: H20 and Kathryn Bigelow’s Blue Steel) was the dealmaker. And having David Gordon Green in the director’s chair while Danny McBride co-wrote was icing on the cake.
The core concept, essentially pitting Myers against three generations of Strode women, was a winner while the film tapped into the kind of multigenerational nostalgia that turned Jurassic World, The Force Awakens, Beauty and the Beast and It into mega-hits. It is playing as a fan-driven affair and an event movie for genre junkies. Like those flicks, it has a deeply primal concept (escaped mental patient returns to his hometown after 40 years and resumes his killing spree) that made it a deeply appealing attraction for casual moviegoers. As such, Halloween will A) outgross every single prior Michael Myers movie on the first weekend and B) end up selling more tickets than every prior Halloween movie save for Halloween, H20 and Halloween II by tomorrow night.
I’ve studied the film industry, both academically and informally, and with an emphasis in box office analysis, for 28 years. I have extensively written about all of said subjects for the last ten years. My outlets for film criticism, box office commentary, and film-skewing s…
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