Movies
Universal’s ‘Wolf Man’ Opened to $12.5 Million Over the Long Holiday Weekend
It’s no secret that Universal has been having a tough time bringing their classic Universal Monsters back to the big screen for a new generation in recent years, with films including Renfield, The Last Voyage of the Demeter and Abigail failing to turn a profit at the box office. The sole success story of the bunch was Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, a bold take on the classic monster tale that scared up $144 million on a Blumhouse budget of just $7 million.
Whannell is back at the box office with Wolf Man for Blumhouse and Universal, another fresh take on a legendary monster from the Universal catalogue. The new movie’s production budget is a reported $25 million, quite a bit higher than the cost of The Invisible Man back in 2020. That means it’ll have to make more to become profitable, and it’s not off to a great start so far.
Wolf Man scared up $12.5 million across 3,354 theaters at the domestic box office over the 3-day Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend, $10.9 million of which was made across the traditional 2-day weekend. Worldwide, Wolf Man has thus far howled its way to $17.3 million.
Here in the United States, Wolf Man failed to hit the number one spot on the box office charts for the weekend, topped by both Mufasa: The Lion King and new release One of Them Days.
For the sake of comparison, Whannell’s The Invisible Man opened to $28 million in the United States back in 2020, nearly three times higher than Wolf Man‘s debut performance. Both films, along with the aforementioned Renfield, Demeter and Abigail, are part of Universal’s new initiative to forgo a shared Monsters Universe and instead focus on one-off movies that stand on their own two feet, but it looks like maybe even those plans need to be taken back to the drawing board. One could argue that modern audiences just don’t care enough about the classic monsters to get them back on the top of the box office charts here in the modern era.
Then again, Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu just hit $156 million at the box office, becoming one of the highest grossing horror movies of all time. So perhaps the bigger issue here is the quality of Universal’s recent output, with poor word of mouth likely tanking Wolf Man in particular. One thing’s for certain: modern audiences aren’t going to turn up to watch these movies based on IP alone, and that’s been a clear message audiences have been sending to Hollywood in recent years. We’ll be tracking to see how Universal pivots their plans in the years to come.
Christopher Abbott (Poor Things) stars in the new movie as Blake, a husband and father who inherits his remote childhood home in rural Oregon after his own father vanishes. With his marriage to wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) fraying, Blake persuades Charlotte to visit the property with their young daughter, Ginger (Matlida Firth). But as the family approaches the farmhouse in the dead of night, they’re attacked by an unseen animal and, in a desperate escape, barricade themselves inside the home as the creature prowls the perimeter.
Meagan Navarro wrote in her review for Bloody Disgusting, “Whannell is a talented filmmaker with bold ideas, but his Wolf Man is stretched far too thin to the point where it lacks a firm identity. The filmmaker dismantles the lore and delivers a bold new take on the werewolf, but it’s so wrapped up in its underserved characters and subtext that it forgets to be scary.”
Judging from the unprecedented box office success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms adaptation, you’ve likely already seen the liminal horror hit that managed to make audiences afraid of empty hallways and bad wallpaper. And now that so many of us have already entered the yellow labyrinth (some of us more than once), the time has come to discuss the spoiler-filled details that make the movie so fascinating in the first place.
And if there’s one element here that makes the Backrooms movie stand out from any previous lore/mythology, it has to be the genius addition of the Still Life entities. Warped recreations of real people that somehow wandered into the Complex, these misremembered creatures are responsible for some of the most disturbing imagery of 2026 – as well as laugh-out-loud memes created by one of the film’s very own concept artists.
However, true to Parsons’ word that the movie would rely heavily on practical effects, each of these distorted monsters was brought to life by real actors under heavy layers of makeup and prosthetics (with the occasional splash of CGI enhancements). While Anora and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You actress Ivy Wolk wasn’t among these performers, despite what Letterboxd might have you believe, the creature cast did benefit from veteran players with plenty of genre experience.
For starters, Alien: Romulus alumni Robert Bobroczkyi (who previously brought that film’s horrific Offspring to life during its most memorable sequence) plays the flick’s main antagonist, the Still Life version of Captain Clark. And though there was some obvious CGI involved in making the character’s peg-leg and nightmarish face more believable, Bobroczkyi’s monstrous performance and his natural 7’7″ frame helped to make that final chase sequence a clear highlight among this year’s genre offerings.
The film’s Texas-Chain-Saw-inspired “dinner” scene also features a freaky collection of less-aggressive Still Life creatures in the form of the Bearded Man, the Red-Headed Woman and, strangest of them all, the cheekily named “Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life” (who earned this title among fans and crewmembers as a reference to his apparent affinity for lamps).
While this was the first major horror outing for both Patrick Baynham (The Bearded Man) and Dana Mahmood (Archibald), Rhiannon Roberts has worked as a stunt performer in everything from Yellowjackets to HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation – which is probably why The Red-Headed Woman is the most active out of Clark’s impromptu “family.” That being said, the Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life is my personal favorite of the bunch simply because his anachronistic outfit suggests that the Backrooms phenomenon might be a lot older than the Async Foundation. I also love how hard he tries to be helpful with that little light of his!
That might be it for the Still Life entities, but I think horror fans will also be pleased to hear that the film’s Found Footage prologue stars none other than Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City star Avan Jogia as Naren Warne – and American Mary herself Katharine Isabelle also shows up in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo at Mary’s house party towards the middle of the story (though I have a feeling that she originally had a bigger part that was likely cut for time).
At the end of the day, Parsons’ Backrooms may have been an auteur-driven project motivated by the young director’s unique take on the classic creepypasta, but film has always been a collective artform, so it’s fun to see just how many talented performers it takes to bring this kind of supernatural nightmare to life in a way that connects with so many people.
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