The revival of cinema boxoffice now includes the horror genre, after being mostly missing in action during the pandemic and its aftermath.
Two unheralded scare flicks — “Obsession” and “Backrooms” — just blossomed into genuine blockbusters.
Focus Features distributed “Obsession,” which rolled up $169 million in domestic boxoffice (U.S. and Canada) since its May 15 premiere. A24 released “Backrooms,” which collected $149 domestically since May 29. (Star Renate Reinsve, above, gets squeezed by two walls in “Backrooms.”)
“Coupled with ‘Backrooms,’ ‘Obsession’ has helped turn the industry on its head in less than a month,” Alex Ritman writes in Variety.
Horror went missing as a hot genre around the time the pandemic hit. “Five Nights at Freddy’s 2,” “The Conjuring: Last Rights,” “Weapons” and a few others are on the short list of traditional horror hits over the past four years. The list is longer if adding films straddling multiple categories like “Sinners,” which was also a period drama and thriller, “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” with comedy and fantasy, and a few others.
And Warner Bros. Pictures’ “The Bride!” (pictured below) is among a handful of big-budget, major-studio releases in recent years that didn’t connect with audiences, in a further indication of this genre’s malaise.
Horror-genre energy clearly deflated recently, and Hollywood loves scare films. When they are hits, horror titles are highly-profit since they almost always are low- and medium-budgeted movies. Horror generates a goodly number of surprise “sleeper” hits.
Production costs are low because such films don’t have demanding special effects, often have cheap-to-produce contemporary settings and the genre is not star-driven, so talent costs are not excessive. Marketing is not expensive either because the audience, those so-called movie fanboys, can be efficiently reached on pop-culture media outlets. Focus Features and A24 are classified as independent distributors, which traditionally feast on the horror genre.
“Obsession” is one such diamond-in-the-rough that soared. Produced for a shoe-string-budget $750,000, “Obsession” was acquired by Focus in 2025 after screening in the Midnight Madness section at the Toronto International Film Festival. Focus, the specialty distribution arm of Universal Pictures, reportedly paid $15 million, and is being richly rewarded by its boxoffice performance in cinemas.
“Focus’ approach with rolling out [“Obsession”] has been old school, a la theatrical releases in the 1980s,” wrote Anthony D’Alessandro in Deadline.com on June 9. “They didn’t go uber wide in weekend one at 4,000 theaters, rather, 2,615 sites during the pic’s opening weekend.”
The Deadline.com article continues: “There are smaller markets which are still discovering the film, with the current [June 9] theater count at 2,900. We’re also getting reports of ‘Rocky Horror Picture Show’-type vibe with the Curry Barker-directed movie spurring audiences to shout back at the screen.” The “Rocky Horror” reference is to the camp 1975 comedy that runs in midnight cinema supported by die-hard fans, most of whom shout comments in response to screen action.
Meanwhile, “Backrooms,” which reportedly cost a low-budget $10 million to produce, is now A24’s biggest all-time grosser, surpassing last year’s ping-pong Oscar contender “Marty Supreme.” Fans have bought up all the licensed merchandise of One Wish Willow magic stick, a fictional product seen in the movie. It’s a $6.99 novelty that is sold out on the Focus online merchandise store; some buyers offer to resell for $25 on eBay.
Domestic boxoffice hasn’t returned to prepandemic levels, but is improving, riding some favorable trends, which includes the bounce-back of the horror genre. Domestic boxoffice hit a recent peak of $11.3 billion in 2019, which is the last full-year not undercut by the pandemic. Cinema in recent years is generating boxoffice in the $8.5 billion–$9 billion range annually.
In the first quarter (January-March 2026), overall domestic boxoffice is narrowly the best in the post-pandemic era. With that good start, an improved full year is expected, given performance since then and the slate of new releases teed up.
Favorable trends are video streamers such as Amazon MGM Studios carving out significant cinema windows before video. Its sci-fi yarn “Project Hail Mary” generated a blockbuster $343 million in domestic boxoffice and Amazon MGM is on the trajectory to deliver a flow of movies to theaters like a major studio.
Even Netflix, which has been cool to cinema release of its original films, is warming to a big-cinema strategy. These favorable developments are particularly welcome as some legacy major studios are in turmoil.
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