10 Upcoming Horror Movies Facing ONE Big Problem

This year's reboot of The Strangers wasn't a good movie at all, but to be completely fair to it, the slasher retread grossed almost $50 million worldwide against a tight $8.5 million budget.

While nowhere near as successful as the original Strangers - which grossed $82.4 million in 2008 - The Strangers: Chapter 1 was certainly a solid gain on sequel The Strangers: Prey at Night, which reaped a more modest $32.1 million in 2018.

All the same, Lionsgate quite ambitiously had director Renny Harlin film an entire trilogy of new Strangers movies back-to-back, with Chapter 2 set to drop next year and Chapter 3 at an unspecified date. Except, given that Chapter 1 landed a "C" CinemaScore, it doesn't exactly suggest there to be much audience interest in seeing this story develop into a trilogy. 

So, it's reasonable to expect the law of diminishing returns to swiftly kick in, with the second and third films likely grossing considerably less than Chapter 1.

Though the sequels are basically too low-budget to bomb outright, squeezing out a trio of mediocre movies in quick succession seems like an easy way to kill off overall interest in the horror brand in record time. They're not thinking about the long game here at all.