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If the scariest thing for a studio head to contemplate is a flop, executives with plenty of horror flicks in the pipeline have little to fear.
Not only did The Conjuring: Last Rites have the largest opening for a horror movie in history over the weekend, earning $194 million worldwide, but it was just the latest example of a scary movie surpassing industry expectations this year. At a time when even superhero tentpoles no longer reliably turn out filmgoers, horror has become the closest thing to a safe bet that studios can hope for these days—the final girl of the box office.
The genre’s dominance this year wasn’t a foregone conclusion back in January. Horror stumbled out of the gate in 2025, with Universal’s Wolf Man taking in just $34 million worldwide on a $25 million budget. Director Leigh Whannell’s previous stab at reviving a Universal monster property, The Invisible Man, brought in a much-more-lethal $144 million back in February 2020, making it tempting to view the two films as a case study in pre- and post-pandemic box office. Luckily, it turned out to be a fluke.
Other horror movies released in January followed a more typical pattern for the genre of low budget and low risk. Steven Soderbergh’s experimental haunted house outing, Presence, grossed a paltry $10 million, but avoided flop status because Soderbergh made it for an even-paltrier $2 million. It was followed by the late-January AI-gone-wrong chiller, Companion, which nearly quadrupled its $10 million budget. Of course, these January bright spots were only a sneak preview of where horror was headed this year.
The Conjuring: Last Rites—the ninth film in a multi-headed series that includes Annabelle and The Nun sub-franchises—followed a slew of horror hits of all shapes and sizes. There were IP-extending reboots like Final Destination: Bloodlines ($307 million) and 28 Years Later ($150 million); original stories from exciting directors, like Ryan Coogler’s Southern-fried vampire opus Sinners ($366 million) and Weapons ($251 million and counting), the follow-up to Zach Cregger’s surprise 2022 hit, Barbarian; along with pure schlock like Clown in a Cornfield, which made nearly $13 million on a $1 million budget, making it Independent Film Company’s (IFC’s) biggest horror hit in its 25-year history. No other genre is enjoying so much success with both originals and beloved IP.
Scary movies have remained a sturdy enticement for moviegoers in the years since COVID-19 and the rise of streaming led to a post-2019 theatrical downturn. Recent hits like Alien: Romulus, Nosferatu, Nope, Smile and Terrifier 3 have regularly lured crowds from their couches over the last few years. What seems different in 2025, though, is how consistently this genre has been overperforming at the box office, confounding industry analysts.
The new Conjuring, for instance, was projected to bring in $50 million at the domestic box office this past weekend, and ended up with $83 million. Weapons was tracking for $25 million to $30 million, but opened to $43 million instead, and managed to stay on top for three of the next four weekends. The new Final Destination similarly overshot expectations for its first weekend by about $12 million, and went on to outgross the series’ previous top entry, 2009’s The Final Destination, by about $120 million.
The success of Sinners, meanwhile, has become one of the biggest Hollywood stories of the year. After it beat opening weekend estimates of $40 million by $8 million, several insider publications poured cold water on that victory, pointing out that Sinners would have to make somewhere between $185 million and $300 million to break even on its relatively high $90 million budget and complicated back-end deals. The film ultimately blew right past the highest of those projected figures, beating the curse of the second weekend drop-off.
These horror movies aren’t just hitting big relative to their budget sizes—like February’s The Monkey, which made nearly seven times its $10 million price tag—they’re bona fide blockbusters, surging like superhero movies did in the 2010s.
As for the actual superhero movies, they’re continuing to adjust expectations downward after the 2019 peak of Avengers: Endgame, which made $2.8 billion and remains the second-biggest movie of all time, just behind Avatar. Long gone are the days when the $200 million budgets and $100 million marketing spends for Marvel movies made financial sense, as one or two of them were practically guaranteed to crack a billion dollars each year. Indeed, none of the three Marvel movies released in 2025 surpassed the first Ant-Man movie’s $519 million take a decade ago, although The Fantastic Four: First Steps came close, with $515 million. At the time of Ant-Man’s release, amid Marvel’s imperial era, it wasn’t even considered that big a hit.
Former juggernaut Pixar is also a long way from its billion-dollar glory days, with this summer’s Elio tapping out at $153 million. And while the live-action remake of Disney’s Lilo and Stitch was a massive success, becoming the only Hollywood movie this year to cross the billion-dollar mark, another live-action Disney remake, Snow White, was a costly bomb that didn’t even earn back its $209 million budget, making the live-action remake subgenre a mixed bag at best.
Horror movies, on the other hand, are looking like the only sure thing left for theatrical releases in 2025. Even rare disappointments like the killer robot sequel M3GAN 2.0 ($39 million on a $25 million budget) and slasher reboot I Know What You Did Last Summer ($60 million on an $18 million budget) have an enviably low floor for losses. And with a slate for the remainder of the year that includes sequels for Predator, The Black Phone and Five Nights at Freddy’s—along with Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein—horror is poised to continue making a killing in 2025.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joe Berkowitz is a contributing writer for Fast Company, where he explores all things digital culture, especially how we live, work, and do business in a rapidly changing information environment. His coverage runs the gamut from profiles of interesting businesses and creators, the streaming wars, social media, as well as the objects and technology that define our lives.
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