After the trailblazing run of “A Minecraft Movie” and the word-of-mouth success for “Sinners,” one would expect a horror film based on gaming IP to have a great shot in theaters.
That was not the case for Sony’s “Until Dawn,” which didn’t impress with an $8 million domestic opening over the weekend, well behind current R-rated favorite “Sinners,” a “Star Wars” rerelease, “The Accountant 2” and “A Minecraft Movie.”
With a $15 million budget, that’s no financial disaster for “Until Dawn,” which also brought in $10 million internationally. From an industry perspective, the whole point of filling out slates with horror is that they either turn an easy profit off smaller budgets or are easily forgotten in the eyes of investors if they miss their mark.
But “Until Dawn” should wake up the studios to a challenge they don’t seem to have anticipated: Theaters are facing a glut of horror movies scheduled in 2025, potentially exhausting the appetite of their intended audience.
With fewer tentpoles from major studios in 2024, wide-release horror films across the leading distributors have already done some heavy lifting to fill out those slates. But this year Sony, Warner Bros. and Neon are dramatically increasing their horror output, while Universal has a whopping seven horror films on its slate, none of which come from Focus Features.
Five horror films from Universal were plenty last year, but now Universal has seven out of the 29 horror films on the calendar that were released or are scheduled. Between Universal, Neon, Sony and Warner Bros., those four have 23 horror films on the books for 2025 versus just 12 last year.
And so far, “Sinners” is the only one to deliver substantial results.
After two big tentpoles in “A Minecraft Movie” and “Captain America: Brave New World,” “Sinners” is the third-best opening of the year. But in a year that’s been slow for hits, no other horror films made 2025’s top 10 openings.
“Sinners” is also an outlier in that it’s a $90 million-budgeted effort from Ryan Coogler, the steward of multiple “Black Panther” and “Creed” movies that did exceptionally well at the box office in part by reuniting with those films’ bankable star, Michael B. Jordan. It was a true A-list horror effort.
Barely any of the horror films before “Sinners” hit $30 million domestically. Neon’s “The Monkey” finished its run at just under $40 million, which isn’t bad but is half as much as director Osgood Perkins’ “Longlegs,” a summer hit in 2024 that set a new domestic best for the indie distributor.
Otherwise, only Sony’s “Heart Eyes” made it to $30 million, mostly off a curious enough Valentine’s Day audience, but viewers flocking to that slasher hurt Warner Bros.’ “Companion” in its second weekend. Universal and Blumhouse’s “Wolf Man” didn’t see the kind of January enthusiasm “M3GAN” achieved two years ago, and subsequent Blumhouse film “The Woman in the Yard” shared an opening weekend with A24’s horror-comedy “Death of a Unicorn,” hurting the audience for both. Another Blumhouse effort, “Drop,” is struggling to make it past $15 million domestically because of April’s genuine blockbusters stealing the show.
The rest of the calendar isn’t as bleak but will test several horror franchises.
The next big horror swing, Sony’s “28 Years Later” on June 20, is a $70 million production from the originators of the first film in 2022, director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland, with “Oppenheimer” Oscar winner Cillian Murphy returning in a supporting role. The film is intended to kick off a trilogy, and the second film is already scheduled for January 2026, arriving from director Nia DaCosta, whose last horror effort was “Candyman,” a modest hit in 2021.
Arriving in theaters three weeks after the second season of “The Last of Us” finishes airing on HBO, “28 Years Later” is another zombie-adjacent project matching the scale of the series, giving it a decent shot.
More unpredictable are the franchise returns of “The Conjuring,” “Final Destination,” “I Know What You Did Last Summer” and “Anaconda.” Given the successful return of “Scream” to theaters that started in 2022, “Final Destination” has pretty good odds on May 16, as that series was last seen in 2011, just like “Scream 4” that year. “Weapons” and “Bring Her Back,” from directors Zach Cregger and the Philippou brothers, respectively, will also aim to continue their hot streak with respective hits “Barbarian” and “Talk to Me” in recent years.
The surest bet closing out the year is “Five Nights at Freddy’s 2,” another mashup for gaming and horror whose debut in 2023 amassed nearly $300 million globally.
Best case scenario: Studios are careful enough in spreading the rest of their movies across the 2025 calendar to avoid them canceling out one another. But as we’ve already seen with superhero movies, a genre that has also struggled with overserving its target audience, too many scary flicks could come back to haunt Hollywood.
