Domestic Earnings of All Horror Movies Released Through the First Half of 2016

Who’s winning, and who’s losing? Those are the questions we’re interested in. And, with the help of BoxOfficeMojo, we’re going to do our best to answer those questions.

With films like The Conjuring 2, Independence Day: Resurgence, The Purge: Election Year and The Shallows still active in theaters, you can’t put too much faith in the provided numbers, as each of those pics will obviously see some financial adjustments once their theatrical run has completed the race.

But let’s stop babbling and get into it. As of the time of this writing – July 3^rd – all numbers are accurate according to imdb.com.

• The Conjuring 2 $95 million against a $40 million budget.
• Independence Day: Resurgence $72 million against a $165 million budget.
• 10 Cloverfield Lane $72 million against a $15 million budget.
• The Huntsman: Winter’s War $48 million against a $115 million budget.
• The Boy $35 Million against a $10 million budget.
• The Shallows $35 million against a $17 million budget.
• The 5th Wave $34 million against a $38 million budget.
• Gods of Egypt $31 million against a $140 million budget.
• The Purge: Election Year $30 million against a $10 million budget
• The Forest $26 million against a $10 million budget
• The Witch $25 million against a $3 million budget.
• Pride and Prejudice and Zombies $10.9 million against a $28 million budget.
• The Darkness $10.7 million against a $4 million budget.
• Midnight Special $3.7 million against an $18 million budget.
• Green Room $3.2 million against a NA
• The Other Side of the Door $3 million against a NA

There are a lot of impressive numbers on display, and there are a few underwhelming figures and a missing tally or two to boot. It’s time to now look a little closer at the numbers we’ve got and try to decipher what films are winning, and what films are sinking. And why either extreme can so easily befall a production.

In the first full six months of 2016 we’ve seen 16 horror films earn theatrical releases. The number of screens each of these films played on, as you can see above, differ dramatically (The Witch enjoyed a peak run in 2,204 theaters, while in contrast, the brilliant Midnight Special landed on 521 theaters), and that makes it tough to determine the hit from the failure.

But we try. You’ve just got to try and take these breakdowns with a grain of salt.

Quick note: Now, since we have no idea of the budgets to film Green Room and The Other Side of the Door we’re going to omit them from this breakdown.

14 of the 16 films have disclosed budgets, and the sum of all 14 equals $613 million.

That’s a lot of money to create entertainment. Let’s see how successful these films were in entertaining.

Again, we’ll tally the box office figures only from the 14 films with disclosed production costs.

The sum of all ticket sales equals $528.3 million dollars.

In the first six months of 2016, Hollywood’s been busy losing somewhere in the ballpark of $85 million on our genre alone.

Why?

What happened?

What films failed to live up to expectations?