Movies
‘The Blackening 2’ – Sequel to This Year’s Horror-Comedy Officially in the Works
After scaring up $18 million in theaters earlier this year, horror-comedy The Blackening is getting a sequel from Lionsgate, Variety has exclusively announced this afternoon.
Variety notes, “producer MRC and domestic distributor Lionsgate have entered into talks with Dewayne Perkins, Tracy Oliver and producer E. Brian Dobbins to develop a follow-up film.”
The first film was made on a production budget of just $5 million, so there’s needless to say lots of potential for this to become a profitable Scary Movie-type horror franchise.
Stay tuned for more on The Blackening 2 as we learn it.
The Blackening, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, centers around a group of Black friends who reunite for a Juneteenth weekend getaway only to find themselves trapped in a remote cabin with a twisted killer. Forced to play by his rules, the friends soon realize this ain’t no motherf****** game.
Directed by Tim Story (Ride Along, Think Like A Man, Barbershop) and co-written by Tracy Oliver (Girls Trip, Harlem) and Dewayne Perkins (“The Amber Ruffin Show,” “Brooklyn Nine-Nine”), The Blackening skewers genre tropes and poses the sardonic question: if the entire cast of a horror movie is Black, who dies first?
Joe Lipsett wrote in his 4-star TIFF review, “While the film isn’t Scream levels of meta, The Blackening fuses social commentary about the Black experience in contemporary America with slasher conventions in a highly entertaining fashion.”
“The humour is successful, the violence is fun and frequently cheeky, and the characters are loveable,” Joe’s review for BD continues. “In a slasher film, that’s saying a lot!”
The Blackening stars Antoinette Robertson, Dewayne Perkins, Sinqua Walls, Grace Byers, X Mayo, Melvin Gregg, Jermaine Fowler, Yvonne Orji, and Jay Pharoah.
Curry Barker’s Obsession has been on a generational run at the box office these last several weeks, with the incredible word-of-mouth driving the box office totals higher and higher and higher with each passing week. After a debut weekend of $17 million, Obsession made a whopping $23 million in its second weekend, and then scared up $26.4 million in its third weekend. In its fourth weekend, Obsession just scared up another $25.6 million in the U.S.!
Deadline notes in a report this morning, “Obsession reps the biggest fourth weekend ever for a horror movie ahead of 1999’s Blair Witch Project which did $24.3M.”
Worldwide, Obsession is now the highest grossing movie in history for Focus Features. The current worldwide total is $224.7 million, while the domestic total is $152.1 million.
That also makes Obsession the highest grossing horror movie of 2026, far exceeding the $207.9 million worldwide total ($121.9 million domestically) of Scream 7 earlier this year!
Yes, the highest grossing horror movie of 2026 is an ORIGINAL HORROR MOVIE!
The best part? The production budget for Obsession was just $750,000, with Focus Features acquiring the film for a reported $15 million. Even when you factor in the marketing spend and the fact that theaters get their own sizable cut, this one is a MASSIVE win for Focus.
From A24 and director Kane Parsons, Backrooms is already nipping at the heels of that record after just a couple weeks in release. The current domestic total of Backrooms is $135 million, while the worldwide total is now sitting at a very healthy $212.6 million. That means Backrooms has also already surpassed Scream 7, and may soon pass Obsession as well.
In Curry Barker’s theatrical debut Obsession, after breaking the mysterious One Wish Willow to win his crush’s heart, a hopeless romantic finds himself getting exactly what he asked for but soon discovers that some desires come at a dark, sinister price.
Inde Navarrette (“Superman & Lois”) and Michael Johnston (“Teen Wolf”) star.
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