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

The Stars of the Year

The truth is it isn’t too difficult to look at this list of movies and understand why they enjoyed success on the big screen. The Conjuring is a red-hot franchise manned by one of the most talented young filmmakers in the business. Of course the masses were curious about The Conjuring 2.

A lot of the same can be said for 10 Cloverfield Lane, a quasi-follow up to Cloverfield. The picture is radically different from the POV insanity that Cloverfield offered up, but it’s a fine looking production with a few stellar performers and a mystery climax that just might catch you completely off guard. This is a franchise that clearly still has plenty to give viewers.

The Boy, The Forest and The Shallows all fit in a tidy barrel. Each film arrived on the heels of impressive trailers. Each film features an attractive woman fronting, and each film was treated to ceaseless promotion, which certainly didn’t hurt (I am still mad at the lack of a scantily clad Lauren Cohan).

We all wanted to see if The Boy would produce a monster fit to rival Chucky, and followers of The Walking Dead were overjoyed to see Lauren Cohan step away from the small screen to tackle a genre film all by her resilient but lonesome self. It turns out The Boy left many feeling robbed of their theater ticket, but if I’m being honest, the finale caught me completely off guard, and that alone was worth the price of admission.

The Forest enjoyed the most prolific push of these three, and if it weren’t for some embarrassingly poor decision making, and sketchy dialogue, this one may have won a lot of hearts over. As it is we see a cutie heading into a haunted forest in search of her twin sister. Apparently that was enough to lure more viewers to theaters than many pundits predicted.

And then we come to The Shallows. And while a great number of us were really hoping for this generation’s Jaws, what we got was a stupid but fun film that offered horny teenagers the chance to gawk at Blake Lively for an hour and a half.

We’ll speed though our assessment of The Witch, because the film didn’t succeed on its own merits exclusively (well, I suppose it did and it didn’t) word of mouth ignited, an uncontrollable blaze roared to life and left everyone even remotely involved in the genre chatting the film up. Turns out the hype was justified, and then some.

And finally we look to The Purge: Election Year, the third pic in a growing franchise that seems to add a few hundred thousand with each new picture to land in our laps. While I loathed the original feature, I felt The Purge: Anarchy fixed a lot of the things I considered broken within the first film. No doubt fans wanted to see if The Purge: Election Year could do the near impossible and one-up the film that one-up’d the original. Reviews have been mixed thus far, but the picture is doing strong numbers and should exit its theatrical run with somewhere between $60 million and $80 million from domestic crowds. That’s certainly no failure. The film hasn’t been released to international markets yet, but you can bet the big bucks will continue to pour in once this one touches down in a few different countries.

The second half of 2016 should see some interesting films hit theaters and VOD outlets. Will we see a string of successful pictures? How many more commercial horror releases can Hollywood stomach, and will more horror really make more money?

We hope so!