Horror movies remain a major piece of the box office pie. Even in the modern day, when movie attendance isn’t as healthy as it once was, fans are still flocking to the likes of Sinners, Weapons, and Final Destination Bloodlines. The success of horror movies at the box office has long been a secret weapon for studios that want to spend a little and then make a lot with a successful project. Sometimes, however, a horror movie comes along that not only exceeds box office expectations but generates so much money that it enters a different stratosphere entirely from its competition.
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Back in 2018, Blumhouse and Universal Pictures delivered Halloween, a legacy sequel from director David Gordon Green that revived the series. When the film premiered, it was the first from the iconic franchise in eight years, and the eleventh in the series in total. Time was one of the factors really working in the movie’s favor when it came to its box office success, but the fact that it was well-received upon release and had no real competition was a perfect storm for the film. As a result, Halloween has a place in box office history that may never be overcome.
Halloween Holds a Horror Movie Record Decades in the Making
When it premiered on October 19, 2018, Halloween opened to $76 million at the domestic box office, a number that immediately made it the highest-grossing movie in the entire franchise. In the end, the movie ended up grossing more than double its opening weekend, bringing in $159 million domestically in just over a month. Globally, however, the film had equal success, with international box office pushing it to a worldwide total of over $255 million.
With that number under its belt, Halloween officially became the highest-grossing slasher movie of all time, breaking an 18-year-old record held by a surprising film, Paul Verhoeven’s Hollow Man. The proliferation of the slasher movie subgenre in horror movies may have some fans certain that their success in the 1980s likely means that there are several high-profile pictures in the history of slashers. In truth, most of them were cheaply made and cranked out quickly, and though their box office was profitable, it was never to the tune of hundreds of millions.
The only films that really bucked this trend were marginally more recent. Scream and Scream 2 in the mid-90s still rank quite highly on the list of top slasher movies, with $173 million and $172 million global totals, respectively; that franchise’s popularity trend continued with 2023’s Scream VI, which brought in $169 million globally. As a result, it’s highly unlikely that another slasher movie will be able to come along and dethrone Halloween from its place, that is, unless Scream 7 arrives next year and surprises everyone.
Suffice to say, the competition to become the highest-grossing slasher movie is not a huge pool, but in the end, Halloween‘s success pushed it into a totally different realm from anything else that came before. The film was able to not only build on the legacy of the franchise that it was a part of, bringing back Jamie Lee Curtis for the first time in 16 years and giving her character an actual story to work with, but it also arrived at a time when the box office was at one of its healthiest places. In the end, a perfect storm for the boogeyman to take his place at the head of the table.
Halloween (2018) May Have Broken the Franchise (and Horror)
The success of Halloween at the box office resulted in the exact same things that happens any time a horror movie is immediately very successful: the calls for more, and imitators. Two sequels were developed and released for Halloween, with Halloween Kills arriving in 2021 and Halloween Ends premiering in 2022. Though the two films ended up doing well at the box office (despite a simultaneous streaming release on Peacock), they both brought in over $100 million at the global box office, it may have been a bit of a curse on the longevity of the series and also horror as a whole.
As the title “Halloween Ends” implies, the last movie in the series ended the story, taking Michael Myers off the board for good and finally allowing Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode the chance to rest. In the years since, one report revealed Miramax is developing a Halloween TV series, but with just three years before the 50th anniversary of the original movie, it is only a matter of time before the franchise haunts the big screen again.
This brings us to the problem that the 2018 Halloween created. Not only did the film set sky-high expectations for the box office but it put the continuity of the franchise in a place where there’s no place to move it ahead without yet another clean slate. No other slasher series has rebooted itself or wiped away sequels as being non-canon quite like Halloween. Though the next instance of the series will call for that to happen again, the problem is that the next movie cannot just repeat what made 2018 successful (franchise star’s big return, direct sequel to the original movie). Instead, the series will be forced to push itself into something totally new. This is always a scary prospect for studios that are working on franchises, but especially when working on one like this that has a lot of box office hopes earmarked on its success.
For the horror genre at large, though, Halloween’s success meant trying to cash in on what worked in a different way. Legacy sequels have been a thing in Hollywood for years, but Halloween climbing the box office mountain meant it would influence countless other attempts to do the same. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Candyman, and even Scream all got revivals geared around rebooting their respective properties. Though only Ghostface and the kids of Woodsboro were able to come remotely close to Halloween, it didn’t stop anyone else from trying. Time will tell what happens the next time the boogeyman comes home, and if audiences are ready to return too.
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