Weapons is about to dominate this weekend at the box office, bringing in nearly $40 million, a huge haul for most horror films. Now, as reviews and audience ratings roll in, Weapons not only has some of the best scores of the decade somewhere like Rotten Tomatoes, but a new metric has come in, its Cinemascore.
Cinemascore is a direct measurement of audience sentiment that many studios take very seriously. A movie can be beloved by critics, but lead to far less enthused fans, which leads to a potentially depressed box office.
It is very, very difficult to land a high Cinemascore for a horror film. But Weapons is now in rarified air with an A-, which is rare enough to only have been given to classics like Get Out and Silence of the Lambs. The decently well-received Barbarian, Zach Cregger’s last film before Weapons, only got a C+, for instance. Companion, one of this year’s best horror films, has a B+.
The only recent film to surpass this A- metric for a horror movie was Sinners, with a full-on A rating, the first in almost 40 years for a horror movie, the last one being Aliens in 1986. Sinners has gone on to make $365 million worldwide this year.
Weapons will go down as one of the biggest success stories of this year, both critically, through audience metrics and at the box office. It raises questions about what director Zach Cregger will do next. And we know what he’ll do, at least to some extent.
- Cregger’s next project is a Resident Evil movie, which is based on the games, but will not be a full-on adaptation of the games, but rather he’s concocted his own story within the world.
- Cregger has also made headlines for talking up a script he wrote called “Henchman,” about a low-level goon on Gotham City, a story in which the new DCU’s Joker and Harley would appear. He hasn’t pitched it to DC yet, but no doubt that’s about to happen after Weapons.
- Finally, he has said that it’s not out of the question that he’d make Weapons 2, as there might be more to tell in that universe despite a somewhat conclusive ending to the first film.
This is a sort of “blank check” situation for Cregger, who after a huge success like Weapons, can have his choice of project from here. It’s similar to Ryan Coogler after Sinners, who is making his third Black Panther movie and an X-Files reboot, of all things.
Weapons is in theaters now, and we’ll see what the final numbers are for both its review scores and its box office soon enough.
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