It came down to the wire, but Halloween weekend rewarded writer-director Scott Derrickson’s Black Phone 2, co-penned by C. Robert Cargill (who also co-wrote The Black Phone, adapted from Joe Hill’s horror short story). The sequel slayed the competition and regained the weekend domestic box office crown with $8.3 million.
Chris Chalk stars in “It: Welcome to Derry.”
Source: HBO, Warner
Black Phone 2 By The Numbers
Black Phone 2 currently sits at $61.77 million in North America, and $43.25 million internationally, for total worldwide ticket sales of $105 million. The original The Black Phone topped $161 million back in 2021 off a summer season release. Both are modestly budgeted, the sequel at $30 million, so it’s well into profit territory and will have an equally healthy life on home entertainment going forward.
Regretting You originally claimed to have won the weekend, but horrible reviews and audience disinterest represented by a B grade via Cinemascore sank its Sunday hold, while Black Phone 2 overperformed enough on Sunday to score the first place finish. Interestingly, both films star Mason Thames (contender for Dick Grayson, aka Robin/Nightwing in the cinematic DCU’s Batman movies?), so he’s got the honor of starring in the top two films at the box office right now.
Horror is doing banger business in 2025. The Conjuring: Last Rites exorcised $485 million, Sinners scared up $367 million, Final Destination Bloodlines grossed $315 million, and Weapons took aim at $268 million.
I named The Black Phone as one of the best horror films of the 2020s in my recent Halloween article. (check that one out, and also my nuclear war “horror” list as well) One thing about that film that I particularly enjoy, and came to appreciate even more after screening and reviewing the new HBO horror miniseries It: Welcome To Derry, is how it film reminds me of a Stephen King novel. It has the aesthetics and tone of a King novel, but also a pacing and sense of the sometimes excruciatingly ordinary progression of life in an otherwise ordinary town full of ordinary people trying to live ordinary lives, that comes from the actual reading of a King novel.
This is an aspect most adaptations of King’s work don’t shoot for or don’t achieve, but when it happens (as it did so pefectly in the It films, and in Welcome To Derry, and in The Black Phone) it’s great.
Black Phone 2 appears on course for a roughly $130+ million final global cume, depending on how much the past weekend’s Halloween-fueled stronger hold and #1 position results in enough continued positive word of mouth to translate into modest weekly declines in weeks ahead.
Nuremberg, Train of Dreams, and Predator: Badlands arrive this week, while The Running Man and Now You See Me: Now You Don’t hit theaters a weekend later. But heavy hitter Wicked: For Good kicks off the holiday season on November 21st, and the subsequent week sees Zootopia 2 enter the end-of-year box office sweepstakes as a major contender among top-grossing films of the year.
Five Nights At Freddy’s 2 is another horror movie likely to do good box office business when it arrives a month from now on December 5th. The first Five Nights At Freddy’s pulled down $297 million off a low $20 million budget, so the sequel with its $51 million spend can do half the business and still come away in black ink (not that I expect Freddy’s 2 to suffer that sort of falloff).
So there’s certainly room for Black Phone 2 to attract new viewers for a few more weeks, as the slate of new films doesn’t cut too deeply into Black Phone 2’s primary target audience much or shift media narrative enough to overshadow the horror sequel’s ability to cut through the noise to younger audiences and horror fans.