With its extraordinary weekday box office numbers, Sinners is truly taking off as a box office phenomenon that doesn’t come around every day. While its second weekend gross will really tell the story of how high it could go domestically, it looks assured at this juncture to become one of the biggest R-rated horror movies ever at the box office. In fact, if it continues to hold well in the coming days, Sinners could cross $200 million in North America, a staggering sum for a horror film audiences 17 and younger can’t see alone.
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Typically, Hollywood studios have avoided R-rated fare (whether it’s horror or otherwise) out of fear that this restrictive MPAA rating will cost the studio crucial dollars from younger moviegoers. In the last decade, features like the Deadpool trilogy have combated this notion that an R-rating is a kiss of box office death. However, past R-rated horror movies have also done their part. This includes a collection of grisly scary films that you might not have expected to be such box office titans.
What’s The Biggest R-Rated Horror Movie In History?
Far and away the biggest R-rated horror movie in history domestically (without adjusting for inflation) is 2017’s It. The first theatrical film chronicling the horrors of Pennywise grossed a jaw-dropping $328.82 million domestically, an unheard-of sum for any horror movie, let alone an R-rated one. Dropped in early September and made for just $35 million, It was a money-printing exercise for Warner Bros./New Line Cinema. Like the first Deadpool a year earlier, It also helped redefine the ceiling for how big any R-rated movie could go in North America.
It dethroned the long-standing R-rated horror champion in this territory, The Exorcist. Released in 1973, The Exorcist collected $231 million, making it one of the biggest films in history at the time of its release. Rather than warding away audiences from seeing it, The Exorcist’s grimy material (which necessitated an R-rating) only made it more of a must-see. This was a feature that would’ve been impossible to imagine existing in American theaters just a decade earlier, when The Hays Code was still in effect. An R-rating only sweetened the deal for Exorcist moviegoers by promising them a movie that could inspire nightmares for years to come.
As of this writing, the only other R-rated horror film to crack $200+ million domestically is It: Chapter Two with a hefty $211.59 million gross. Next up on this list is Get Out’s $175.83 million haul. At the time of its release (just months before the first It), Get Out was only behind The Exorcist in R-rated horror movies domestically. That was an incredible achievement for an original motion picture with no pre-existing source material. The only other R-rated horror movies to exceed $140+ million domestically are Us ($175.08 million), Hannibal ($165.09 million), 2018’s Halloween ($159.36 million), and The Blair Witch Project ($140.53 million).
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R-Rated Horror Hits Are Becoming More Common
Sinners is about to enter incredibly rarefied company even if it suddenly becomes inexplicably frontloaded and tops out at $180-190 million domestically. For the longest time, the only two R-rated horror movies to clear $150+ million domestically were The Exorcist and Hannibal. In the last eight years, that number’s ballooned to include three more projects. Sinners will make four. That expansion speaks to how much horror cinema has gone through a pop culture resurgence in the last decade.
The age of horror remakes and found-footage features in the 2000s and early 2010s seemed to cap a very tight ceiling on how high 21st-century horror movies could go at the domestic box office. However, mid-2010s features like The Conjuring, It Follows, and Don’t Breathe started a renaissance for horror cinema that’s still going on today. The kind of horror movies playing in normal theatrical wide releases has expanded, and the moviegoing population has similarly expanded. It’s hard to imagine something like Longlegs getting a major theatrical push just 15 years ago. However, it became a major summer 2024 release and audiences turned out in droves for such an unexpected horror film.
With this increase in the amount and types of horror films playing in multiplexes, that’s allowed more opportunities for R-rated horror to hit it big at the box office. However, even considering this phenomenon, it’s still impressive how big features like the two It installments, Us, or Sinners are performing. All conventional wisdom says R-rated horror (especially ones not based on any pre-existing source material) shouldn’t flourish financially. Yet here are titles like Sinners crushing the box office and becoming the biggest R-rated horror films in history.
Sinners is now playing in theaters, It is now streaming on Max.
