By Travis Johnson
It’s been a pretty sluggish year in terms of box office, with a number of high profile movies underperforming and North America recording its worst numbers in a decade. And then along comes IT, Andy Mushcietti’s ambitious, long-gestating adaptation of Stephen King’s epochal 1986 novel, to blow everyone else out of the water.
IT pulled in $7.47m in Australia and $1.2m in New Zealand, giving it the biggest opening for a horror movie in either country. The film managed to pull off the same feat in the US, earning $117m and punching through a staggering number of box office records like they were the half-formed memories of childhood nightmares.
Just looking at Australia for the moment, IT has managed to score:
• Biggest all-time September opening weekend.
• Biggest opening weekend for a WB film in 2017.
• Biggest all-time opening weekend for a horror film.
• 6th Biggest opening weekend in 2017.
• 22nd all-time Warner Bros. opening weekend
• More than double the opening weekend of The Conjuring 2
That’s pretty decent for a horror movie, a genre that traditionally only manages to do well on a small budget. To be fair, we’ve had a few decently-budgeted fright flicks this year, including The Mummy and A Cure for Wellness (And, if you want to squint a bit, The Dark Tower), but they all crashed and burned at the box office. Lest we forget, The Mummy was supposed to launch Universal’s Dark Universe franchise – tellingly, there appears to be no mention of that particular franchise on the recent Mummy home release.
So, with that in mind, don’t expect IT‘s box office success to translate into a production slate packed with high profile, decently budgeted horror fare – but it’s safe to say that IT: Chapter Two is a lock.
