Smile has nabbed the best second-weekend box office hold for a horror film since Get Out. The project is the feature directorial debut of Parker Finn, who expanded it from his own 2020 short film Laura Hasn’t Slept. The film stars Sosie Bacon – the daughter of Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick – alongside an ensemble cast that includes Jessie T. Usher, Kyle Gallner, Caitlin Stasey, Kal Penn, and Rob Morgan.
Smile opened wide on September 30. The film follows an ER therapist (Bacon) whose chance encounter with a traumatic event causes her to begin to experience bizarre hallucinations involving smiling people. The film combines elements from other classic films like The Ring and It Follows to create a new entry in the transferable curse subgenre.
Per Deadline, this weekend’s box office results are in, and they are rather unexpected. There were two new wide-release movies in theaters this weekend – the Shawn Mendes family musical Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile, and the David O. Russell ensemble piece Amsterdam – but those films took #2 and #3 respectively, beaten out by Smile, which raked in $17.6 million in its second weekend. This is just a 22% drop from its opening weekend gross of $22 million, an astonishingly low dip for a new release horror film that gives Smile the best second-week hold for a horror movie since Jordan Peele’s smash hit Get Out in 2017.
How Horror is Helping Save 2022’s Dismal Box Office
The box office in 2022, which features the first full slate of new releases since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, has been a notoriously up-and-down affair. The year opened with the continuation of Spider-Man: No Way Home‘s record-shattering run and featured strong grosses for many franchise projects including Top Gun: Maverick, which was released on May 27 and has raked in $1.48 billion so far, becoming the fifth highest-grossing domestic film of all time. Outside of those phenomenal successes, the box office has entered a period of sustained doldrums overall, particularly in September, which had a dearth of new wide-release movies that allowed Top Gun to rise to #1 again on Labor Day weekend.
The one exception to this rule seems to be horror, which has seen a particularly strong showing throughout the year. Beginning with the success of Paramount’s slasher sequel Scream in January, the genre has topped the weekend charts 6 times this year so far, largely with original titles like Nope, The Invitation, Barbarian, and Smile. Next weekend’s release of David Gordon Green’s trilogy capper Halloween Ends is also more or less certain to dominate the weekend, proving that the genre – which 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 – might be the key to resuscitating the box office after a supremely troubling year.
