On Thursday night, hands across America weren’t in some random desert — they were in a movie theater to watch Us.
Jordan Peele’s follow-up to Oscar winner Get Out, which he described as being a “horror movie without any caveats,” is off to a record-breaking start at the box office. Us made $7.4 million last night, which not only outgrossed genre contemporaries like A Quiet Place ($4.3 million) and The Nun ($5.4 million), but it’s also the “biggest Thursday preview gross for an R-rated movie that isn’t a sequel or isn’t based on anything,” according to Forbes. (It’s fourth overall for an R-rated film, following Paranormal Activity 3, Halloween, and It.)
Jordan Peele’s Us delivered an absolutely massive $7.4 million from Thursday night previews, which began last night in 3,510 theaters at 7 p.m. The performance is more than four times as large as the $1.8 million in previews Get Out brought in two years ago and is just behind the $7.7 million in previews Halloween brought in last October before going on to open with over $76 million. It’s still too early to say if that kind of performance is in sight, but to say Us is likely to top $60 million seems almost a foregone conclusion. (Via)
That’s a massive opening for any non-Marvel, non-Star Wars, non-Pixar (so, non-Disney) movie, but especially for an original horror movie. Box Office Pro surmises that the huge debut is due to “the absence of a horror title appealing to a variety of audiences since last October [which] creates a wide open market for this to break out over the weekend.” Or maybe — and hear me out — people like good movies. Somewhere out there, Corey Feldman is smiling.
(Via Forbes, Box Office Mojo, and Box Office Pro)
