‘Evil Dead Burn’ Turns to Ashes at the Box Office

As hard as Evil Dead Burn goes, its opening weekend is shaping up to be a real disappointment.

After weeks of tracking in the $25 million to $30 million range, the latest estimates have the film opening at a brutal $13.7 million domestically. That’s a massive miss and well below where just about everyone expected it to land.

Why?

I have no idea.

The only thing I can even remotely point to is that this was the first genuinely beautiful weekend across much of the Midwest and East Coast since spring. It also landed right in the middle of the FIFA World Cup. I was at my kid’s birthday party, and everywhere I looked, there were dads standing around watching the matches on their phones. Whether either of those things actually had anything to do with the box office, who knows? But something clearly kept people away from theaters this weekend.

Whatever the reason, the result is the same.

Evil Dead Burn has opened significantly below both of its predecessors.

Fede Álvarez‘s Evil Dead (2013) opened to $25.8 million before finishing with $54.2 million domestically and nearly $100 million worldwide. Lee Cronin‘s Evil Dead Rise debuted to $24.5 million and ultimately climbed to $67.2 million domestically and more than $147 million worldwide.

History tells us that horror films opening around $15 million generally finish somewhere between $30 million and $40 million domestically, depending on their legs.

And here’s where I think this gets really ugly.

Next weekend, Christopher Nolan‘s The Odyssey hits theaters, and I think it’s going to extinguish Evil Dead Burn for good.

That’s the real problem.

My prediction is that Burn is going to get absolutely hammered in its second weekend. Horror movies are already notoriously front-loaded, and I wouldn’t be shocked to see a 70% drop. Hell, it could even push 80%.