Apparently the budget is rumored to be only $2 million which I find hard to believe, but if true it will still be a success, but being the final installment in the trilogy A24 has to be disappointed in these results.
https://x.com/borreport/status/1809949518559125683?s=46&t=DMQDx60Wq9xO5em2fnHvQQ
I saw that it was projected to earn $9.7 million domestically from it's OW. What the fuck happened?
The truth is the A24 worship is a largely online phenomenon that is made up of a small group of cinephiles (and sometimes I wonder if bots are involved too). Most people don't like or care for their output. This reminds me of Beau is Afraid. Ari Aster coming in hot of two highly acclaimed horror movies (Hereditary & Midsommar), the best things since sliced bread if you listen to the hipsters online, starring Joaquin Phoenix who recently won an academy award for Joker... and it grossed a little over $12 million worldwide.
Enter MaXXXine. X and Pearl have much fandom online, yet here we are. A $6 million OW? Fucking pathetic. The Strangers: Chapter 1 grossed nearly twice that, and it had poor reviews and reception too, much more so than MaXXXine. That movie got pelters from critics and even movie fans online. Some would say The Strangers is a franchise and a known I.P., well so is fucking MaXXXine now. It's a brand spanking new trilogy!
Horror opening weekends, domestic;
------------------------------------------------
A Quiet Place: Day One - $52.2 million
The Strangers: Chapter 1 – $11.8 million
Night Swim – $11.7 million
Abigail – $10.2 million
Imaginary – $9.9 million
The First Omen – $8.3 million
The Watchers - $7.0 million
MaXXXine - $6.7 million ????????
Tarot – $6.5 million
Immaculate – $5.3 million
Lisa Frankenstein – $3.6 million
Late Night with the Devil - $2.8 million
The Exorcism - $2.5 million
You hit the nail on the head. The A24 audience is a lot more on an online echo chamber than they lead you to believe.
shareI honestly wonder if they 'astroturf' by using bots on sites like Reddit and Letterboxd. I don't like to be a conspiracy theorist but it just doesn't make sense. They get so much acclaim online, their movies get so much activity and engagement on websites (Letterboxd, IMDb and so on), yet time and time again their movies do feeble numbers at the box office. It just doesn't add up. It's been nearly a decade since The Witch came out and they started cultivating this 'elevated horror' brand, where is the payoff?
I guess another alternative is just that a lot of their fans don't go to cinemas at all. That the so called 'cinephiles' who love 'real cinema' don't actually pay for movies and that the looked down upon normies with 'bad taste' actually go to cinemas and pay to watch movies. You'd think 'cinephiles' would actually, you know, go to cinemas? But maybe not!
Haven't you considered that the fans of these films are happy to wait until the films hit streaming services and watch them at home? I know I am. I'd rather watch Beu is Afraid for around three hours on my sofa with everything I need within reach.
share^ This
It’s not even just for A24 horror films it’s all horror films. Since the pandemic no horror film has surpassed $300 million worldwide at the box office. The last horror film to make over $400 million was It Chapter 2 in 2019.
Less and less people are going to the cinema and just preferring to wait at home it seems.
A24 are honestly such a joke.
I can't wait for Smile 2 to completely dick their entire output by outgrossing every single horror movie they've released put together.
Jesus Christ, did someone at A24 kill your mother? Ripping on a movie like Hereditary by calling the people praising it hipsters? Martin Scorsese and Stephen King don't strike me as hipsters.
Maxxxine is in the mold of the horror b movies that lined shelves in video stores in the mid-eighties, and the marketing made no secret of that. It is the third in a series, but the first two entries were very niche as well. Comparing its box office to movies like the Strangers part whatever, which had a marketing budget that was much bigger and was designed to put teenagers in seats, like it means something is pretty damned ridiculous.