‘Halloween Ends’ Begins With Strong $5.4 Million Thursday

Zero more days till Halloween Ends, Halloween Ends, Halloween Ends. Zero more days till Halloween Ends… Silver Shamrock!

Universal and Blumhouse’s Halloween Ends earned $5.4 million in Thursday preview showings. That compares to the $4.9 million earned by Halloween Kills via previews this time last year and the $7.7 million Thursday preview gross for Halloween in 2018. We can expect more frontloading due to fan-driven preview interest, the whole ‘previews start earlier in the day than even back in 2018’ variable and arguably more folks choosing to watch it on Peacock than even last year with Halloween Kills. Considering the mixed-negative critical consensus (I liked it more than the previous two, but I’m on a contrarian streak of late) and the whole ‘just for fans’ variable, Universal should be thrilled with anything near the $49 million opening of Halloween Kills last year.

This is a $33 million, R-rated slasher threequel, so even something closer to $35 million won’t be a tragedy. The reviews are slightly better than this installment (45% and 5.3/10 on Rotten Tomatoes versus 38% and 5/10 for Halloween Kills). To be fair, back in the day, nobody expected The Babysitter Killer Strikes for the 12th Time! to get good reviews. We’ll see if it plays closer to the Fifty Shades trilogy capper (whereby Fifty Shades Freed essentially tied the overall grosses of Fifty Shades Darker) or the Maze Runner: The Death Cure (which earned noticeably less domestically than the earlier two Maze Runner flicks). Both but threequels opened with around 80% of their respective sequels. That would give Halloween Ends around $40 million for the weekend.

This threequel, picking up four years after Halloween Kills (which took place the same night as Halloween), is more of an epilogue to the Laurie Strode/Michael Myers saga. I appreciated its left-field turns and (especially for the first act) its existence as very much a Halloween film from the guy who directed All the Real Girls and Snow Angels. My wife and two oldest kids watched it on Peacock last night, and they were very much among the 55% ‘rotten’ crowd. Losers… Anyway, a straight 10% Thursday-to-weekend split (like the last two) gets Halloween Ends to a terrific $54 million, while a split like It Chapter Two ($91 million from a $10.5 million Thursday) gets it to $47 million for the Fri-Sun weekend.

This is a good Thursday preview gross for a threequel which earned better reviews than I expected. I think Universal and I were expecting Fantastic Four-level pile-ons, but the ‘different is good’ horror crowd came through enough to move the needle. Even if it is heavily frontloaded, think 15% of its weekend gross on Thursday, that’s still a $36 million opening weekend. That would be behind only Jordan Peele’s Nope ($44 million) and David Gordon Green’s Halloween Kills ($49 million) among R-rated openings since Bad Boys For Life. It’s another win for the horror genre following The Invitation, Barbarian, Smile and Don’t Worry Darling. It also affirms Universal, which has been dropping buzzy trailers (Violent Night, M3gan, A Knock at the Cabin) all month long, as the king of theatrical horror.