Horror's Biggest Franchises


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'm looking at series made up of at least three movies. Here is a chart showing unadjusted domestic (U.S. and Canada) box office gross for 21 horror franchises:


(Remember, the chart shows theatrical box office data, so it doesn't say anything about profits from home video. Also, some of these series had direct-to-video sequels; my charts only include domestic theatrical box office data.)

The overall results shown in the graph are probably not too surprising, though for some reason I did not expect Alien to be the highest-grossing franchise. I also didn't expect Saw to rank so high. I would say I also expected the Scream series to place higher. But in general, the relative order of the franchises isn't too surprising.

Now here is a chart showing estimated number of tickets sold, based on average ticket price for the release year (from boxofficemojo.com):


It shouldn't be surprising that The Exorcist moves to the top of the chart, but that is really due to the cultural phenomenon that was The Exorcist (1973), which grossed almost $233 million domestically. That gross would make the movie a big hit even today (and it's the equivalent of almost a billion dollars in 2017). The other films in the series were much less successful (compared to The Exorcist's 132 million tickets, Exorcist II: The Heretic sold under 14 million tickets, while the later entries sold around 6 million tickets each).

It might be a little surprising that Alien remains the second highest-ranked franchise by ticket sales. In the case of the Alien franchise, the first two films were the most successful (Alien sold about 32 million tickets and Aliens sold about 23 million). The charts below give more information about the success of each movie in the Alien series:



While Prometheus (2012) jump-started the series to some extent, if we look at the number of tickets sold, Prometheus fell below the first two movies in the series, and despite grossing over $74 million domestically, Alien: Convenant (2017) sold the fewest tickets of any Alien movie.

I plan to look at the performance of the rest of these franchises, movie by movie, in the future, so please stay tuned.

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