There is one arena in which Disney will never be able to compete with WB and that’s horror movies. The house of mouse has a family friendly image and it can’t afford to have brutal, R rated movies in their resume. This leaves the party wide open for WB to come in and take over.
Superhero movies make big headline and bring in big money, but they are also very expensive to make. Horror movies on the other hand are cheap to make, and their box office potential is endless.
The Conjuring Universe alone made over a billion dollars. The most expensive movie in that franchise is The Conjuring 2 has a budget of about only $40 million dollar. The movie made $320,270,008 worldwide. That’s a lot of money that stays in WB pockets.
Ever since WB stole James Wan from Blumhouse Productions he has been directing or producing some very profitable horror movies for WB. WB are so happy with what he did with The Conjuring Universe that they let him direct Aquaman, which will probably be a little horror oriented.
The director of Annabelle: Creation, David F. Sandberg, first directed Lights Out, both film had James Wan as a producer. Both films are also WB films, but Annabelle: Creation is a serious upgrade in terms of box office profits as The Conjuring Universe has a lot of attraction. David F. Sandberg also received a nice promotion from WB and is now the frontrunner to direct Shazam!.
Lights Out is not the only successful horror movie outside of The Conjuring Universe. You may have heard of another small, successful movie this fall called IT. The most viewed trailer for a movie in the first 24 hours has delivered on its box office promise. IT had a modest budget of just $35 million dollars, but it made an astonishing $631,007,374 as of October 16. IT is the highest grossing horror movie of all times, both in the United States and worldwide. With IT: Chapter 2 coming in 2 years, WB pockets will be full.
The Conjuring Universe is also expanding with a few more movies coming to us soon: The Conjuring 3, The Nun (a spin-off) and The Crooked Man (another spin-off). Despite some legal issues that WB has found itself regarding the rights of the source material of the franchise, I predict a lot of box office success with these movies.
The only real competition that WB faces in the horror genre is from Blumhouse Productions. However, Jason Blum who heads the company is known for his strict small budgets, something that WB doesn’t really concern itself with. Still with movies like Get Out and now their own horror superhero franchise with Glass They are the only real competition.
However, along with other companies producing their own horror movies we might be getting just way too many horror movies in the coming years. Not all of them will be good. Probably most of them won't be.
However, for now, surprisingly it is WB who has established themselves as the horror empire to try and beat out.
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