10 Awesome Recent Movies That Didn't Deserve To Bomb
1. The Night House
Budget: undisclosed
Box Office: $15.5 million
Horror is one of the genres that's continued to thrive throughout the pandemic, largely because their budgets tend to be relatively low and they typically skew towards younger audiences.
Yet more "artsy" horror has still faced an uphill struggle, as evidenced by the brilliant, Rebecca Hall-starring The Night House, which was dumped in 2,240 North American cinemas with minimal marketing last August.
Despite rave reviews for Hall's superb, awards-worthy performance and David Bruckner's tense, restrained direction, it failed to become a wider word-of-mouth hit as Searchlight Pictures clearly hoped, finishing at a paltry $15.5 million worldwide.
Even though the film's undisclosed budget wasn't massive, it clearly wasn't super low either, and so there's no chance it turned a profit theatrically.
It didn't help that the trailers largely sold the film as a more conventional horror flick, when it was in fact a quiet, restrained, "weird" type of genre offering, as surely led to it receiving a dire "C-" CinemaScore from audiences who felt deceived.
This likely killed its word-of-mouth and ensured that a lot of potential customers waited to watch it on streaming instead.