20 Huge Horror Movie Hits NOBODY Expected

While A Quiet Place certainly touted an intriguingly unique premise, that didn't mean it would translate to box office dynamite for many reasons.

For one, John Krasinski had no prior cred in the horror genre as either an actor or filmmaker, and his two directorial efforts before this were both middlingly received. Beyond that, there was the obvious potential for a film about silence to be an absolute nightmare to sit through in a crowded cinema, given the tendency for modern audiences to consider silence a wholly optional courtesy of the moviegoing experience.

And even after the film premiered to rave reviews at SXSW a month before release, it still seemed like Krasinski's film would be a decent-but-not-stratospheric hit. But A Quiet Place topped out at an insane $341 million - over 20 times its $17 million budget.

This placed it ahead of many bigger-budget tentpoles released that year, including Skyscraper, Ocean's Eight, Pacific Rim: Uprising, and Creed II, as well as entries into popular horror IP like Halloween, Insidious: The Last Key, and The Predator. And like that, a new horror franchise was born, and between the two mainline movies and prequel spin-off, it's sitting at just over $900 million worldwide against a total budget of just $145 million.