19 Years Ago, A Controversial Movie Reboot Set a Box Office Record That Only a Marvel Hero Could Beat

Every year, in part thanks to inflation, there are a slew of distinct box office records that either get broken or brand-new ones that are set. 2026 has been a major success story for the box office, with major examples being Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey becoming the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time and Curry Barker’s Obsession delivering some of the most impressive random box office records throughout its $500 million haul. Spider-Man: Brand New Day continues to set and break records in the one month it has been in theaters, with a handful of major ones still within its sights over the next couple of weeks.

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To that end, movie fans are routinely considering box office records as part of the larger conversation around new releases. Even now, fans have this December circled based on the idea that Avengers: Doomsday and Dune: Part Three might have one of the biggest box office days in history. Some box office records are so cemented, though, that they stick around for years and no one even realizes they’ve been broken until they happen. 19 years ago today, a new movie arrived that would set a record that would stick around for over a decade, with Rob Zombie‘s Halloween becoming a surprising box office phenom.

Rob Zombie’s Halloween Generated Major Controversy, But Still Broke Records

Ahead of the release of Rob Zombie’s Halloween movie, the reboot of the slasher franchise caused what can only be summarized as a “brouhaha” among genre fans ahead of time. One reason that fans were adamantly opposed to this idea was because of the decades of history that had already been established within the Halloween movies; a reboot where Jamie Lee Curtis was replaced by another actress as Laurie Strode was seen as somewhat disrespectful. On top of that, Zombie’s previous movies, House of 1,000 Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects, had a pretty distinct tonality that stood in stark contrast to John Carpenter’s original movie.

That first complaint about the film, though, one that made waves on forums and comment sections before a frame had even been shot, largely ignored the convoluted history and franchise lore of Halloween anyway. Across eight movies, the series had become nonsensical, with sequels that ignored others and more than one branching timeline. To that end, a fresh start for Halloween wasn’t the worst idea.

When the movie arrived, though, Zombie’s sensibilities were on full display, creating an all-new controversy as it removed any of the mystique and uncertainty around Michael Myers as a killer and instead gave specific answers for why he did the things he did on Halloween night. In the end, though, the controversy was good for business, as Halloween opened to $30.5 million, delivering the biggest opening weekend for the franchise but also setting the record for Labor Day Weekend.

Halloween (2007) Held Onto Its Record…Until Shang-Chi Arrived

Before Halloween took the record in 2007, Jason Statham’s Transporter 2 was the record holder with $20 million for the four-day weekend, sitting ahead of the two Jeepers Creepers movies. That makes the number Halloween brought in even more impressive, but the film also held off plenty of other releases that arrived afterward, like the music-doc One Direction: This Is Us, Grindhouse spinoff Machete, with the closest competition being the horror film The Possession, with $21 million.

There are two good reasons why Rob Zombie’s Halloween was able to not only set the Labor Day Weekend box office record, but hold on to it for years. The first is that Labor Day always falls on the first Monday of September, meaning it often arrives at a time when the release calendar for movies is at a very, very low point.

August alone long had an almost January-like reputation for being a dumping ground, which means that Labor Day weekend was often seen as the spot for studios holding on to a horror movie or action film to unload it at the end of Q3 of any given year. That leads into the second point, which is that the weekend has long held the reputation of being a last hurrah for summer, meaning barbecues and beach trips are usually on the docket for a lot of Americans as the school year is about to start in earnest.

Now, when Labor Day weekend 2021 rolled around, that COVID-19 vaccine had largely been available for months, and movie-going was starting to resemble something somewhat normal. It also marked the release of the first Marvel Studios movie that was exclusive to movie theaters since Spider-Man: Far From Home two years prior, meaning that not only were many ready to get back into theaters, they wanted to see the next chapter of the MCU.

As a result, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings opened on the holiday weekend and…broke the Labor Day weekend box office record in about a day and a half, breezing past Halloween‘s $30.5 million haul with more than $94.6 million across the four-day weekend. To his credit, Zombie even reacted to the record being broken, writing on social media: “It took 14 years but it finally happened! Big Mike was knocked out of the top spot by a King-Fu Master. 14 years is a pretty good run.”

He’s right, fourteen years IS a good run for a record like that, and given the ferocity with which Shang-Chi broke that record, it’s really only a matter of time before another movie comes along and does the same thing again. Though it will be impressive when that happens, the really interesting bit will be how long it held the record, and how that stacks up against a movie many fans had written off before it even debuted.