Scary Digits

As the pendulum swings back again and horror movies start to flex their box office muscle, I thought it would be interesting to look at the commercial success of different franchises. Which franchises have been most successful? The answers are interesting, especially when you compare total box office with the estimated number of tickets sold for the different franchises. Click "Read More" to see the charts and some analysis...

I posted a simple graph on Twitter comparing the U.S. box office gross of It (2017) with that of The Exorcist (1973), showing both unadjusted dollars and dollars adjusted for ticket price. (The data came from Box Office Mojo .) My tweet was a response to the news story that It has outgrossed The Exorcist, making the new Stephen King adaptation the highest-grossing R-rated horror movie of all time, by U.S. box office. While the news stories did point out that the record is not adjusted for inflation, I thought it would be interesting to see just how much of a different inflation makes. Obviously, inflation makes a huge difference. Box Office Mojo adjusts for ticket price, not the overall value of the dollar, so it is more directly relevant to movie grosses. The Exorcist has grossed $232,906,145 in the U.S. (this includes re-releases, which complicate things, but I will gloss over that fact). How many people saw The Exorcist in a movie theater? In 1973, the average movie ticket ...

Hello. If you're anything like me, you're interested in how well horror movies are doing at the box office. This is not because I confuse popularity and financial success with quality, as some people seem to do. Rather, it is because I believe that the commercial success of horror movies measures the public awareness of the genre (and awareness is a good thing), and that commercial success means more genre movies will be made in the near future. It is also fun to analyze data, so basic quantitative analyses will appear here. If you're interested in box office data, I've put together a tool with updated data so you can analyze budgets and grosses (U.S. opening weekend, U.S. total, foreign, total, and grand total) yourself. Click on the "Horror Movie Budgets and Grosses" link under "Scary Pages" to the left (if the list of pages isn't available, you might have to click the menu button to the left). Have fun playing with the data!