Fox Searchlight
"Ready or Not"
- Fox Searchlight's "Ready or Not" has made $31 million worldwide and had a $6 million production budget.
- It dropped only 6.7% from its first weekend at the domestic box office to its second, thanks to the long Labor Day weekend.
- It's a step in the right direction for Fox's film business, which Disney said suffered a $170 million operating loss in the third quarter this year.
- "Ready or Not" is also a hit with critics and has an 87% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes.
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Fox Searchlight's "Ready or Not" snuck into the late summer movie season and the horror-comedy is the latest horror movie to become a hit relative to its low budget.
The movie rolled into 2,855 US theaters on August 23 with $8 million. That might not sound like a lot compared to summer blockbusters, but it had a modest $6 million production budget, according to Box Office Mojo.
Then it took advantage of the long Labor Day weekend. It made $7.4 million over the four-day weekend, a drop of just 6.7% from its debut, according to Box Office Mojo. It has now made $31 million worldwide, five times its production budget.
"Ready or Not," directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, follows Grace (played by Samara Weaving) as she's hunted by her new husband's family in their mansion as part of a ritualistic game of hide and seek. It also stars Mark O'Brien as her husband and Adam Brody as his brother.
While the movie is doing well on its own terms, it's also a step in the right direction for Fox after it was acquired by Disney earlier this year (Fox Searchlight is a Fox studio that focuses on independent, art-house movies).
Disney said during its third-quarter earnings call last month that Fox's film business suffered a $170 million quarterly operating loss, thanks largely to the box-office failure of "Dark Phoenix." But other Fox releases since the merger closed, such as "The Art of Racing in the Rain," have also bombed.
"Ready or Not" hasn't just been a hit with audiences; critics love the movie, too. It has an 87% critic score on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.
Indiewire called it "wickedly entertaining from start to finish, and painted with enough fresh personality to resolve into something more than the sum of its parts."