Since Get Out, Smile has had the best second-weekend box office hold of any horror movie. The project, which Parker Finn expanded from his own 2020 short film Laura Hasn't Slept, is his feature directorial debut. The movie also stars Jessie T. Usher, Kyle Gallner, Caitlin Stasey, Kal Penn, and Rob Morgan in addition to Sosie Bacon, the daughter of Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick.
On September 30, a big smile appeared. The movie centres on an ER therapist (Bacon) who, after a fortuitous meeting with a tragic occurrence, starts to have strange hallucinations of smiling individuals. The movie creates a new entry in the transferable curse subgenre by fusing aspects from past famous movies like The Ring and It Follows.
The weekend box office figures are in, and they are a little surprising, according to Deadline. The family musical Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile by Shawn Mendes and the ensemble work Amsterdam by David O. Russell were the two new wide releases this weekend, but Smile, which made $17.6 million in its second weekend, outperformed them all. This is an astoundingly small decline for a newly released horror movie, and it makes Smile the strongest second-week hold for a horror release since Jordan Peele's breakout hit Get Out in 2017. Smile's opening weekend gross was $22 million.
How horror is boosting 2022's sluggish box office
The 2022 box office has been a typically up-and-down affair, with the first full slate of new titles since the start of the COVID-19 epidemic. Spider-Man: No Way Home continued its record-breaking run at the start of the year, and many franchise projects enjoyed strong box office performance, including Top Gun: Maverick, which debuted on May 27 and has amassed $1.48 billion to date, making it the fifth-highest domestic grossing movie of all time. Aside from these extraordinary achievements, the box office has fallen into a prolonged slump, especially in September, when there weren't many new wide-release films, which allowed Top Gun to reclaim the top spot over Labor Day weekend.
Horror appears to be the lone genre that deviates from this trend, as it has had a very successful year. The slasher genre has dominated the weekend charts six times so far this year, starting with the success of Paramount's slasher sequel Scream in January, mostly because to original films like Nope, The Invitation, Barbarian, and Smile. The release of David Gordon Green's trilogy finale Halloween Ends next weekend is also almost certain to take over the weekend, demonstrating that the genre may be the key to reviving the box office after a particularly difficult year. The genre can be produced cheaply with little to no star power and still be a draw if it has a strong hook, as several of these films have proven.
