Scream’s opening weekend was a box office flop

Scream is arguably the most famous horror film made in the ’90s, but you wouldn’t have guessed that from its opening weekend. like Unified Payment Interface (UPI). Reported on December 23, 1996, “The Scream” was originally overshadowed by three other modern versions:

“MTV’s animated film ‘Beavis and Butt-head Do America,’ featuring a pair of wise-cracking, mean-spirited teens, grossed more than $20 million over the weekend. (…) The second weekend of ‘Jerry Maguire,’ starring Tom Cruise as a sports agent, came in a distant second with $13.1 million in 2,531 theaters.” Show. (…) Disney’s live-action film “101 Dalmatians” remained in third place. For the second week in a row, it grossed $6.9 million in 2,901 theaters. (…) The opening weekend of Miramax’s thriller “Scream” ranked fourth with $6.3 million in 1,413 theaters.

Just $6.3 million in its opening weekend? If “Scream VI” had opened this way, it would have been heralded as an unmitigated disaster Plans for the movie “Scream 7” It was canceled right then and there.

The reason this number seems so low is because the opening weekend is usually the movie’s best. You can usually expect a film’s earnings to drop by more than half in its second weekend, and continue to decline from there. If “Scream” had continued on this path, it would not have broken even with its $14 million budget.

Fortunately, those who saw it on its opening weekend couldn’t stop raving about it, which caught the attention of other moviegoers. “Scream” ended up being one of those rare films where its second weekend bested its first by bringing in $9 million, and its third weekend did even better. Its profits declined after that point, but not as much as you would expect; It was still raising more than $1 million a week as late as Memorial Day weekend in 1997.

A “Scream” movie’s box office triumph is pretty rare today, mainly because of how quickly studios can release their films digitally and streaming. While viewers today know they can wait a few weeks and watch a movie at home at their own pace, they had no choice but to get out of their house and buy a ticket to see the Wes Craven-directed horror film that was a hit for most of 1997. The DVD of “Scream” wasn’t released until December of that year, a full 12 months after the film premiered in Theaters.

But even in today’s fast-paced media landscape, films with long box office legs are still possible. For example, Pixar’s “Elemental” was declared a flop on its opening weekend in 2023, but after seven weeks, it was… Pixar’s best-performing original film since the coronavirus pandemic. Likewise, “Avatar” fans may recall that 2022’s “Avatar: The Way of Water” opened with “just” $134.1 million at the domestic box office, roughly half of what “Spider-Man: No Way Home” bowed to roughly one year earlier. However, The Way of Water was longer, and within a few months, it surpassed No Way Home to become the third highest-grossing film of all time.

All of which goes to show that you should never be so quick to dismiss a film as a colossal failure. Even movies that never made it theatrically can still get a second life via streaming (or, In the case of “The Shawshank Redemption”, By restarting TNT non-stop). As long as there is a piece of art in the world, there is always a chance that it will eventually get the appreciation it deserves.