Box Office: Lisa Frankenstein Lurches Into Theaters With Lethargic $3.8 Million Opening Weekend

Update 02/12/2023: According to The Wrap, the final opening weekend tally for "Lisa Frankenstein" was $3.8 million. The headline has been updated to reflect this. Original article follows.

This weekend brings a jocks vs. weirdos showdown, as "Lisa Frankenstein" prepares to take on the tough box office challenge of competing with Super Bowl Sunday. The movie is the feature directorial debut from Zelda Williams (daughter of the late Robin Williams) and it boasts a screenplay by Diablo Cody, who returns to the horror comedy for the first time since writing 2009's "Jennifer's Body." In her latest spooky tale, Kathryn Newton ("Freaky") stars as the titular goth with a yearning for a dead boy, and Cole Sprouse ("Riverdale") plays said dead boy.

Earlier box office forecasting for "Lisa Frankenstein" had it pegged for a $9 million to $14 million debut, but it now looks set to fall far short of that range. Opening in 3,144 locations, the film grossed just $1.7 million on its opening day (including Thursday previews), and Variety reports that it's now tracking to make just $4 million over the weekend. Looks like this one is a victory for the jocks.

With a budget of $13 million, there's a limit to how hard "Lisa Frankenstein" can bomb at the box office, but it definitely needed a stronger start than this to be a hit. Horror is generally one of the most dependable genres at the box office, but it still needs some buzz to succeed. Last year's Australian indie chiller "Talk To Me," for example, landed with an impressive $10 million opening weekend thanks to rave reviews and a great trailer. By contrast, the current score of 50% on review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes is unlikely to draw moviegoers for "Lisa Frankenstein," and could even dissuade those who were planning to see it.

This looks like the start of a familiar story for screenwriter Diablo Cody. Her last horror-comedy had a similarly poor start at the box office, failing to break even by the end of its run, and to this day holds a score of just 46% on Rotten Tomatoes. However, "Jennifer's Body" has since undergone a fierce reappraisal as memories of the terrible, misleading marketing campaign directed at horny teenage boys faded, and people got to grips with the story that Cody actually wrote. 

"Seeing 'Jennifer's Body,' used as a marketing tool is the funniest thing the world to me," Cody told Empire magazine in a recent interview, referencing the "Lisa Frankenstein" trailer's name-dropping of the 2009 film. "It was such a spectacular failure at the time. If you had told me then that it would be used to market something I wrote in the future, I would have said, 'Why? Why wouldn't you bury that information?'" 

But many movies for teenage weirdos that are now considered classics were once big box office losers, from "Heathers" (which grossed just $1.1 million) to "Donnie Darko" (which made only $517,375 in its initial run). It's practically a rite of passage. Perhaps "Lisa Frankenstein" will find new life, and a new audience, when it eventually makes its way to streaming.