Haunted Mansion's $25 Million Opening Weekend Won't Pay The Haunted Rent

Among fans of all things spooky, Spooky Season — the extended holiday period leading up to Halloween — is generally recognized as beginning on July 5, since Halloween is the next major commercial holiday after Independence Day. Disney seems to have embraced this idea with the release of "Haunted Mansion," a family-friendly spookfest based on the Disney parks attraction, directed by Justin Simien ("Bad Hair") and starring Danny DeVito, Rosario Dawson, Owen Wilson, and Jamie Lee Curtis.

Unfortunately for the ghosts and ghouls of "Haunted Mansion," the movie had two things working against it: a bloated $150 million budget, and a release date slotted for the weekend after Barbenheimer, the surprise team-up of Greta Gerwig's "Barbie" and Christopher Nolan's "Oppenheimer" that has blown the box office away. Earlier this week, projections for "Haunted Mansion" pointed to a $30 million opening weekend, but after the movie grossed just $9.9 million on Friday including Thursday previews, those expectations have been revised. 

The Hollywood Reporter estimates that "Haunted Mansion" is headed for a debut between $23 million and $27 million, and TheWrap pinpointing $24.5 million as the likely endpoint. It's not helped by poor reviews, with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 42 percent as of this writing, and a B+ CinemaScore indicates that general audiences are similarly underwhelmed.

As if competing with "Barbie" for family audiences wasn't tough enough, "Haunted Mansion" didn't even have a monopoly on horror this weekend. Australian ghost chiller "Talk to Me" arrived in theaters on a wave of rave reviews and is set to finish in sixth place with an estimated opening weekend of $9 million. Given its production budget of $4.5 million — a fraction of the size of "Haunted Mansion" — that's an excellent start.

This week's Tales from the Box Office is all about "Pirates of the Caribbean," the massive hit franchise based on a Disney parks attraction, and how Disney has been chasing the dragon of ride-based movies ever since. It makes sense from a cross-promotion perspective: a movie like "Haunted Mansion" can effectively function as a two-hour commercial for Disney's parks. But while "Pirates of the Caribbean" was an expensive gamble that paid off, equally expensive flops like "Tomorrowland" ($190 million budget, $209 million global box office) and "Jungle Cruise" ($200 million budget, $220 million box office) have been an important lesson in the dangers of doubling down.

One of the first attempts to cash in on the success of "Pirates of the Caribbean" was also based on the Haunted Mansion IP. 2003's "Haunted Mansion," directed by Rob Minkoff and starring Eddie Murphy, grossed a disappointing $182 million against a production budget of $90 million — which is roughly equal to $150 million in 2023 dollars. The first "Haunted Mansion" movie had an opening weekend of $24.2 million, which would be around $40 million today, adjusting for inflation. So, while both efforts have similarly eye-watering budgets for a fun, silly-scary family film, Murphy's "Haunted Mansion" is likely to end up being the more successful of the two.

There is room at the box office for goofy horror-fantasy films aimed at family audiences. After all, kids love Halloween. 2015's "Goosebumps" and its 2018 sequel "Goosebumps 2: Slappy's Revenge" were both modest hits thanks to their sensible mid-October release dates and equally sensible budgets ($58 million and $35 million, respectively). It's unclear why exactly Disney decided that "Haunted Mansion" was summer blockbuster material, but already it's looking like another gamble that hasn't paid off.