Last year saw the highly anticipated release of Halloween, the direct sequel to John Carpenter’s 1978 classic. The film debuted to a gargantuan $76 million and on its way to a very impressive $159 million domestically. It posted the second biggest October opening weekend ever. But for the year, it was only the 18th highest grossing film of 2018 (coming in just behind Hotel Transylvania 3).
Fourteen films released in 2018 have grossed over $200 million domestically, and five of those went over the $300 million mark. So, when viewed through that lens, can we really call Halloween a smash hit? Is that $159 million really all that impressive? With the recent release of David Gordon Green’s 2018 Halloween on disc and digital streaming, I thought it’d be a good time to take a closer look at just how successful the film truly was. And, maybe we can learn a little something about how the movie business operates along the way.
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In order to determine the true value of Halloween’s box office numbers, we have to judge it on two sets of criteria: 1) How did it perform based on its production and marketing budget; and 2) How does it compare to films within the franchise, genre, and sub-genre. Doing this will give us a real idea of the success (or non-success) of 2018’s Halloween.
It’s not really a fair comparison to simply compare box office numbers for a low-budget (albeit, high profile) horror film like Halloween against a mega-budgeted blockbuster like Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (both distributed by Universal). Jurassic World grossed $417 million against a $170 million budget. That’s a 245% return on its budget. Halloween, meanwhile, had a whopping 1590% return on its tiny budget.
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Of course, much more goes into actually determining how much a film really earned. We have to also account for foreign box office receipts, as well as the marketing costs of a film. There’s always some of George W. Bush’s fuzzy math when it comes to determining how much a movie nets after all these factors are taken into account, but there are some general rules of thumb when analyzing box office returns.
- Major studio releases typically end up with a 50/50 split on domestic box office grosses with theaters (also known as exhibitors).
- International box office generally results in about a third returning to the distributors.
- Marketing costs for a film vary, but they are typically equal to around 100%-150% of the film’s production budget.
Using this criteria, Universal managed to bank about $80 million domestically and about another $31 million internationally for Halloween (it made $94 million in foreign box office) after exhibitors took their cut. Going with the higher end of the marketing budget scale, Halloween cost $25 million to produce and market ($10 million and $15 million, respectively). That results in a total haul of about $86 million. Going back to Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, that film grossed a massive $1.3 billion ($418 million domestic, $892 million foreign) off of a pretty hefty $170 million production budget. Applying the same metrics, we arrive at a net profit of $80.5 million for Fallen Kingdom. So, despite grossing over a billion less, Halloween actually netted about $5 million more than Fallen Kingdom. The Jurassic World sequel saw a 47% return on its production budget, while Halloween got a return of 860%. Those are killer figures!
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As amazing as those figures are, box office numbers don’t tell the whole story. How did Halloween perform against similarly budgeted films, movies within the horror and slasher genres? To determine this, we’ll take a look at three box office rankings lists: 1) the Halloween franchise; 2) Horror films within the slasher sub-genre; and 3) R-rated horror films.
To date, there have been eleven films in the Halloween franchise. Before the release of David Gordon Green’s installment in the franchise last year, Rob Zombie’s Halloween, released in 2007, was the previous king of the series, grossing over $58 million domestically, $80 million worldwide. John Carpenter’s original has held up well, despite being released over 40 years ago, ranking fourth with $47 million. 1989’s Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers was (and still is) the dog of the group, grossing less than $12 million. But, 2018’s Halloween blew all previous entries out of the water. Its $159 million is far and away tops in the franchise, earning over $100 million more than Zombie’s Halloween, and it is equal to the next three franchise entries on the list combined. The gap is even wider when looking at worldwide numbers, as 2018’s Halloween grossed $253 million, $173 million more than #2. When adjusting for inflation, the original Halloween takes the top spot with $177 million in adjusted gross and the 2018 entry slips to #2. The full list(s) can be seen here.
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How does Halloween (2018) fare when it steps outside of the franchise and faces other slasher films? The previous top 5 domestic grossers in the slasher sub-genre were as follows:
- Scream – $103m
- Scream 2 – $101m
- Scream 3 – $89m
- Freddy vs. Jason – $82m
- The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) – $80m
As with the Halloween franchise, 2018’s Halloween soared past all previous slasher films, topping Wes Craven’s Scream by $56 million. Worldwide, Halloween is still tops, out-grossing Scream by $80 million. Finally, how did Halloween stack up against all other R-rated horror flicks? It didn’t quite hit the top of the charts (2017’s It, The Exorcist, and Get Out claim 1 through 3), but it does land comfortably in fourth place.
So, what does all of this mean? Well, it is pretty clear that David Gordon Green, Danny McBride, Jamie Lee Curtis, John Carpenter, and Blumhouse Productions scored a massive hit with Halloween. By almost all metrics, it was a huge success, and that is without taking into account revenue from ancillary business, such as merchandise and home video sales. And, as is always the case in Hollywood, success with one film inevitably leads to talk of sequels.
Although nothing official has been announced yet, it is a near lock that a sequel to 2018’s Halloween will arrive sooner than later. In an interview with Deadline shortly after the film was released, McBride revealed “We do have thoughts and ideas of what we could possibly do….There are definitely talks on whether we will do more of them and we’re just trying to see what best makes sense.”
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