‘The Nun’ Sets an Opening Night Record for ‘The Conjuring’ Universe Movies

The Conjuring franchise continues to show strong legs at the box office with the release of The Nun this week. As of reporting this, The Nun has already raked in $5.4M in Thursday night previews – a record best for the franchise and one of the best horror debuts of the year.

Deadline reports that The Nun is now tracking between $47M – $52M for opening weekend, which puts it in shooting range for being the franchise’s best opening weekend ever. For comparison, here’s what the other Conjuring films managed to scare up in their opening weekends:

• The Conjuring – $41.8M
• The Conjuring 2 – $40.4M
• Annabelle – $37.1M
• Annabelle: Creation – $35M

What’s truly amazing about The Nun‘s potential box office dominance is that the hype has been achieved without Blumhouse Pictures putting out a single full trailer to advertise the film:

As you can see above, The Nun indeed flooded the zone with short teasers and TV sports – without releasing a single full trailer. What’s critical about that marketing model is that it side-steps one of the biggest criticisms of the horror genre, today. Full horror trailers usually have to lay out so much of the plot and scares that a lot of viewers come away feeling like they’ve already seen the whole movie – or worse yet, they go to see the film and find out all of the best moments were used to fill the trailers.

With Nun only giving fans small snippets of footage, and having those teases generate so much buzz around opening weekend, the horror genre could take note and make a big adjustment to how other films choose to market themselves. It’ll be interesting to see how the final box office numbers shake out.

The Nun is now playing in theaters.