Related Posts
Source: Variety
Halloween has come and gone, and with it, a nationwide trend of celebrating the holiday by watching whatever horror films one can get their hands on. While many of the films watched during the Halloween season are bonafide classics like “The Shining” and the Universal Monsters franchise, others were much more recently created. In fact, a good handful of these films were just recently completed and released to theaters for the very first time, so there’s a good chance the average film-goer got into the spirit of the season by visiting their local cineplex. “Smile”, for example, was one such film that benefited greatly from the timing of its release, debuting in theaters just before October began and having since earned a total of around $92 million from domestic ticket sales (and there’s still a solid chance of it crossing the $100 million threshold by the end of its run). “Halloween Ends”, meanwhile, has accumulated roughly $60 million since its premiere in the middle of October, a smaller sum than previous entries in the “Halloween” franchise, but still enough for the film to make a profit. Then there is “Barbarian”, which came out earlier than those other horror films and had far less going for it in terms of star power and marketing, yet has still managed to generate over $40 million and more than recoup its $4.5 million budget.
The success of all those films, however, vastly pales in comparison compared to a horror film that, while not coming close to the amount of revenue they had received, has nonetheless performed far more impressively than anyone could have anticipated. The feats of this film, not unlike the earlier-released indie darling :Everything, Everywhere All at Once”, serve as yet another reminder that the success of a film is not judged only by how much money it makes, but how much it’s able to build an audience and create strong enough buzz to attract people beyond the time of its opening. The film in question: “Terrifier 2”, a low-budget slasher film produced by the appropriately named studio Bloody Disgusting and written, directed, edited, and produced by Damien Leone. A sequel to the 2016 cult film “Terrifier” and the third feature film centered around the villainous Art the Clown, has wormed its way into the Top 10 at the box office and stayed there since its release on October 6th and earned a total of $7.73 million in domestic ticket sales. That may not seem like much compared to other films released around this time, but it’s far more than the $250,000 spent to make the film, and this gross is even more spectacular when one analyzes how the film got to this amount.
With not a single major celebrity to headline the film and hardly any promotional support from major motion picture studios, “Terrifier 2” earned about $825,000 from 886 theaters during its opening weekend, about $931 per theater. In most cases, a film that leaves this small of an impact on the box office would come and go with hardly anyone noticing, but “Terrifier 2” didn’t simply come and go once its first weekend finished. In truth, the exact opposite happened; while most major releases, even the more popular ones like “Top Gun: Maverick”, will see some kind of drop-off in ticket sales during the second weekend of its release compared to its first, “Terrifier 2”, despite its theater count being reduced to 700, surprisingly grossed even more during its sophomore weekend, making $850,00 over the three-day period.“We dropped to 700 screens in [our second weekend], and we continued to increase our gross,” claims Iconic Releasing sales and distribution VP Devon Canfield. “That doesn’t happen when you lose locations.” This jump is sales encouraged the distributors to bring the film back to 55 more theaters, increasing its theater count to 755 and allowing the film to more than double its weekend revenue with a total of $1.9 million earned during its third weekend. Most recently, during the fourth weekend of its release, “Terrifier 2”, likely taking advantage of the Halloween holiday, expanded its reach to 1,550 theaters, its widest release yet, and only dropped 4% for a weekend total of $1.8 million. As of this writing, “Terrifier 2” has earned just under $8 million over its lifetime and could surpass $10 million before the end of its run.
The way in which “Terrifer 2” has performed at the box office would be enviable in any situation, but it becomes all the more astonishing when considering just how many factors were working against its favor. For one thing, the film was not given a rating by the Motion Picture Association, a requirement for most theaters to screen a film, so getting it into as many theaters as it was able to was enough of a challenge on its own. Then there’s it’s running time of well over two hours; longer running times usually mean fewer screenings in a given theater at a time, and “Terrifier 2” was only given one or two screenings per day at most of its locations. Lastly, there’s the film premiering digitally (albeit only on the Bloody Disgusting owned platform Screambox) on October 31st, less than a month after its release, which might’ve encouraged some to forego the theatrical release and wait patiently to watch the film from the comfort of their homes.
With all this in mind, how did “Terrifier 2” perform as well as it has in spite of everything that should’ve doomed it to obscurity? To put it simply, word of mouth was just that strong, with Exhibitor Relations analyst Jeff Bock alleging it to be a far greater asset than any marketing campaign. “When the target audience hears ‘vomit-o-rama’,” Bock claims, “that’s worth the price of admission.” Comscore senior analyst Paul Dergarabedian expressed similar sentiments in recognition of the film’s surprise success, stating that the film “has caught fire in a way you don’t see for a movie that’s not from a major studio” and comparing its week-to-week increases to “finding a Sasquatch”. Even the limited number of showtimes has become more of an advantage than a disadvantage; according to Canfield, “almost every showtime is near capacity… theaters have had to switch it to larger houses.”
If there’s any takeaway from the success of “Terrifier 2”, Canfield claims, it’s that there is a demand for cinematic fare beyond just the superhero films and sequels that currently make up most of the major studios’ output. As Canfield himself put it in his words of advice to the nation’s several theaters: “embrace alternative content and don’t be afraid to take risks.”
