Sam Raimi is back with new survival-comedy Send Help, which continues to generate money at the box office in its second week of release. Starring Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien, Send Help just topped the weekend box office for the second weekend in a row here in the United States, the film scaring up another $10 million across 3,475 theaters.
The current domestic total for Send Help is now a reported $35.8 million, while horror master Sam Raimi’s latest crowd-pleaser has generated a total of $53.7 million worldwide.
As we learned last week, the project was originally set up at Sony in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the plan was to release the film straight-to-streaming at the time. Raimi fought for the film to get a theatrical release, ultimately bringing the project to Disney.
With a reported production budget of $40 million, Send Help isn’t yet profitable at the box office, but topping the box office two weekends in a row is a really good sign that the film will continue to generate money for Disney’s 20th Century Studios for many years to come.
Writers Damian Shannon & Mark Swift (Freddy vs. Jason) tweeted today, “Thanks to everyone who came out to see Send Help in the theater. We know it’s cold out, we know money is tight, and we know the vibes are grim. Sitting with a bunch of you in the dark, laughing and gasping and screaming together has been good for our soul. We so appreciate you.”
In Send Help, colleagues are stranded on a deserted island after they are the only survivors of a plane crash. They must overcome past grievances and work together to survive, but ultimately, it is an unsettling and darkly humorous battle of wills and wits to make it out alive.
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And then there’s Markiplier’s self-financed and self-released video game adaptation Iron Lung, which found itself in the third place position at the U.S. box office in its second weekend. Iron Lung made another $6 million this weekend, hitting $30.8 million domestically and $34.2 million worldwide. Made for just $3 million, this one’s pure profit for Markiplier already.
Markiplier will have to split the profits roughly 50-50 with theaters, but he’s coming out on top in a big way with his debut on the scene as an indie filmmaker to watch going forward.
Mark “Markiplier” Fischback wrote, directed and stars in Iron Lung, which adapts the game by David Szymanski. In a post-apocalyptic future after The Quiet Rapture, a convict explores a blood ocean on a desolate moon using a submarine to search for missing stars/planets.
