Movies
‘Annabelle: Creation’ Passing $300 Million Worldwide!
I knew all of our attention would turn to IT once it broke box office records, which is why I rushed up an article pointing out that David F. Sandberg‘s Annabelle: Creation is this year’s most profitable horror film, not Universal Pictures’ Get Out. This isn’t to take anything away from Jordan Peele’s masterpiece but should illustrate just how potent the horror genre is right now. It’s absolutely insane, although I wouldn’t say surprising as horror always performs well during tumultuous times. Things are awful right now and we all want an escape, which is where horror thrives. Studios and horror fans are reaping the benefits.
Digressing, Get Out sits at $250 million worldwide on a $4.5M budget. On a $15M budget, Annabelle: Creation is about to topple $300 million worldwide, with it set to surpass $100M domestically and $200M internationally. Incredible.
Between IT and Annabelle: Creations, Warner Bros./New Line Cinema looks to top $1 BILLION from the horror genre alone by the end of 2017. Holy. Shit.
There are lessons here that I’ve gone over in a previous article. In short, studios needn’t overreact and start pouring money carelessly into horror films, but they do need to start taking our genre seriously and put some weight behind it. Even with mother! underperforming, studios need to take these “safe” risks because one of them could become the next franchise or universe they’re so desperately seeking.
Universal has been having a hell of a time getting their Universal Monsters brand back on a better path in the wake of the Dark Universe collapsing, with four movies thus far released in the years since The Mummy attempted to get that interconnected universe off the ground.
First was Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, to date the only post-Mummy hit for the Universal Monsters, followed by The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Renfield, and now Abigail. The latter three films have attempted to bring Dracula back to the screen in fresh ways, but both Demeter and Renfield severely underperformed at the box office. And while Abigail is a far better vampire movie than those two, it’s unfortunately also struggling to turn a profit.
Where does the Universal Monsters brand go from here? The good news is that Universal and Blumhouse have once again enlisted the help of Leigh Whannell for their upcoming Wolf Man reboot, which is howling its way into theaters in January 2025. This is good news, of course, because Whannell’s Invisible Man was the best – and certainly most profitable – of the post-Dark Universe movies that Universal has been able to conjure up. The film ended its worldwide run with $144 million back in 2020, a massive win considering the $7 million budget.
Given the film was such a success, you may wondering why The Invisible Man 2 hasn’t come along in these past four years. But the wait for that sequel may be coming to an end.
Speaking with the Happy Sad Confused podcast this week, The Invisible Man star Elisabeth Moss notes that she feels “very good” about the sequel’s development at this point in time.
“Blumhouse and my production company [Love & Squalor Pictures]… we are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” Moss updates this week. “And I feel very good about it.”
She adds, “We are very much intent on continuing that story.”
At the end of the 2020 movie, Elisabeth Moss’s heroine Cecilia Kass uses her stalker’s high-tech invisibility suit to kill him, now in possession of the technology that ruined her life.
Stay tuned for more on The Invisible Man 2 as we learn it.
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