UPDATED 10/21/18 12:08 p.m. ET:Halloween fell just short of projections. Universal says the horror flick brought in $77.5 million after a $27.2 million Saturday, according to Deadline. Still, it's by far the highest grossing opening weekend of the Halloween franchise.
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It's only fitting for Halloween to hold the record for an opening weekend in October.
According to Billboard, the sequel to the 1978 John Carpenter classic pulled in $80.3 million from 3,928 theaters, good enough to tie the record for an opening weekend in October set by Venom earlier this month.
The movie follows Jamie Lee Curtis' Laurie Strode, still haunted by the masked and unkillable slasher decades after she first encountered him in her Illinois suburb. It received overwhelmingly positive reviews for a horror movie, thanks to the work of director David Gordon Green and guidance from the suspense master Carpenter, who was hired as a consultant on the film and scored the new movie.
"It was just an interesting experience watching it, the choices he made," he said of watching Green's take on Michael Myers in an interview with Complex. "It felt like meeting a stranger...but I really liked the stranger."
The box office would give Halloween the second-highest grossing opening for an R-rated horror film ever, behind the 2017 remake of It that made $123 million when it debuted last September. The film is already incredibly profitable, making its $10 million budget more than three times over on opening night alone.
The $80 million take easily bests the film's opening weekend record. Before this film, Rob Zombie's 2007 reboot of the original film held the crown with $26 million.
Halloween is just the latest hit from Blumhouse Productions, the company behind just about every horror film to cause a splash in the '10s. The producers of Paranormal Activity, The Purge and Get Out won the rights from Dimension Films after the latter failed to create a new film in the series in time. And they used the iconic horror property to continue their run of critically and commercially successful fright flicks.
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