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Hollywood’s Feel-Good Horror Story

In a time of great anxiety in Hollywood, scary movies are the rare stress-reliever to those in the theatrical business and the direct-to-consumer market, the latest data reveals.

Annarah Cymone in The Midnight Club. Eike Schroter/Netflix
Julia Alexander
September 27, 2022

After all the tabloid drama, Don’t Worry, Darling finally hit theaters this weekend and took in $30 million worldwide. Not bad. But it’s also not the film story that’s most interesting to me. That award goes to Barbarian, a Skarsgård-starring horror pic from 20th Century Studios that has also generated just over $30 million globally, over two weeks, but at a fraction of the production cost. Now the film is expanding in its third week into 500 additional theaters in the U.S. And its week-over-week decline hovered at around 29 percent this weekend—that’s not just good, it’s exceptional.