5 Reasons Why A Quiet Place: Day One Made A Bang At The Box Office

Silence has returned to the box office, but if you listen carefully you might hear the sound of theater owners happily counting their cash. Horror prequel "A Quiet Place: Day One" landed this weekend, and although it's the first "Quiet Place" movie without John Krasinski in the director's chair, the series hasn't skipped a beat. In fact, "Day One" set a new record for the franchise with a mighty $53 million opening weekend at the domestic box office. It also grossed $45.5 million from overseas markets, which adds up to a global opening weekend just shy of $100 million. It's already the highest-grossing horror movie of 2024 after just a few days in theaters.

That box office debut cements "A Quiet Place" as one of the most consistent franchises around. The original 2018 movie scored an opening weekend of $50 million, and "A Quiet Place Part II" opened to $47.5 million in 2021 despite the ongoing impact of the pandemic on box office receipts. Those two movies went on to gross $340 million and $297 million, respectively, by the end of their theatrical runs, so we can expect "Day One" to end up in a similar range. Even with a substantial (for a horror movie) $67 million budget, this is going to be a big hit for Paramount Pictures.

2024 has been a historically bad year for the box office, and horror movies haven't been spared. Up until now the highest-grossing horror of the year was "Night Swim," which topped out at $54.6 million worldwide. So, how did "A Quiet Place: Day One" manage to obliterate that record in a single weekend?

One reason that horror movies have prevailed at the box office where other genres have faltered is the built-in appeal of seeing a scary movie in a theater, surrounded by strangers, and getting scared collectively. And yet, one of the biggest frustrations with the theatrical experience is the behavior of those strangers. All it takes is a couple of people in the audience carrying on a conversation to ruin the experience for everyone else.

The premise of "A Quiet Place" — an Earth overrun by monsters who hunt using sound, forcing the few surviving humans to live in total silence — created a built-in peer pressure for audiences to stop whispering and crinkling food wrappers. People instinctively mimicked the behavior of the characters on-screen. And just in case instinct wasn't enough, some theaters even ran promos warning audiences to "never make a sound."

Forbes contributor Paul Tassi urged movie-lovers to see "A Quiet Place" on the big screen while they had the chance, describing his first time seeing it as "a unique experience that I cannot remember having in ages: A totally quiet theater." He recalled:

"For the entirety of the film, even in a sold out show, I could hear a pin drop. People made startled noises only when the movie itself demanded it, but everyone felt like they were even chewing their popcorn as quietly as they could. I have never seen any other movie result in this kind of pristine viewing experience."

If it was just the first movie, this could be dismissed as a one-off gimmick. But after two equally successful sequels to "A Quiet Place," it seems clear that even in the streaming age, people still want to watch movies on the big screen. They just want the experience to be fun instead of frustrating.

True star power has become rare in Hollywood, as studios depend more and more on franchises and IP rather than specific actors. But horror has always had its own, genre-specific stars — from recurring monster actors like Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney Jr., to "scream queens" like Jamie Lee Curtis and Janet Leigh, who specialized in portraying pure terror so convincingly that audiences couldn't help but be terrified as well. 

That's not an easy task. Asked by Hot Ones host Sean Evans whether acting constantly terrified for a horror movie is especially exhausting, "A Quiet Place: Day One" star Lupita Nyong'o replied, "It really is! And I forgot how exhausting it was when I said yes to this movie." She explained that it's especially difficult because in real life the adrenaline surges that come with fear are short-lived, whereas horror movie actors have to act scared for "take after take after take," and keep re-inducing that energy. "[Joseph Quinn] and I would sometimes just huddle and hype each other up and get our hearts going, kind of like athletes."

This pays off in their performances, and both stars already have built-in credit with horror fans. Quinn had a breakout role in "Stranger Things" season 4 that left audiences eager to see more from him, and "A Quiet Place: Day One" marks Nyong'o's return to the genre after playing dual roles as both predator and prey in Jordan Peele's 2019 horror movie "Us." With another killer horror story now on their resumes, these actors are rapidly becoming horror royalty.

Movie review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes has grown to be both loved and feared by studios. Speaking at Sun Valley Film Festival in 2017, director Brett Ratner declared the website was "the worst thing that we have in today's movie culture" and "the destruction of our business." In an article published that same year, New York Times writer Brooks Barnes recalled a lunch meeting where "the chief executive of a major movie company looked me in the eye and declared flatly that his mission was to destroy [Rotten Tomatoes]."

Apparently that chief executive failed in their mission, because nowadays Rotten Tomatoes is more popular than ever. In many ways it has replaced traditional word of mouth; people use a Rotten Tomatoes score to decide whether they should see a movie in theaters, wait for streaming, or skip it entirely. As marketing executive Jon Penn explained to Vanity Fair:

"Moviegoers love trailers. They pay attention to the TV spots. But Rotten Tomatoes is like the truth serum on the entire [promotional] campaign: are all the things you're telling me about the movie true or not. These scores are almost like a lubricant one way or the other. If it's good, it helps you more than it did in the past. But if it's bad, it hurts you even more."

For "A Quiet Place: Day One," which is now certified "Fresh" with a score of 84%, Rotten Tomatoes was a lubricant that sent the box office slipping in the right direction. (Read /Film's review here.)

Although "A Quiet Place: Day One" opened in second place at the box office, due to the continued success of "Inside Out 2," it has little direct competition in the horror field. The last horror release was Ishana Night Shyamalan's "The Watchers" on June 7. While it's still playing in some theaters, that movie is already winding down its run and dropped out of the box office top 10 this weekend.

The situation will change on July 5th with the arrival of "MaXXXine," Ti West's slasher follow-up to "X" and "Pearl." However, that's a smaller horror franchise from indie studio A24. The two previous entries grossed just $14.7 million and $9.8 million globally, so they're unlikely to make much of a dent when "A Quiet Place: Day One" hits its second weekend. If anything, "MaXXXine" risks getting steamrolled by the more mainstream horror offering.

"A Quiet Place: Day One" has a cat in it. The cat is called Frodo, and he is a good cat. Star Lupita Nyong'o was so terrified of cats before making the movie that she needed exposure therapy to prepare for it. But while making the movie, she fell in love with the two cat actors, Nico and Schnitzel — so much so that after the movie wrapped, she adopted her own cat and now has an Instagram full of "cat mom" pics.

Was Frodo a box office draw for "A Quiet Place: Day One"? The studio certainly seemed to think so. The cat got his own promotional featurette, along with a #SaveFrodo promo, and Schnitzel even joined Nyong'o and Quinn on the press tour. People love cats, and the nightmarish logistics of trying to wrangle a cat in the middle of an alien invasion add a lot of tension to the events of "Day One." Hopefully, Nico and Schnitzel had a good back-end deal in their contracts because they deserve a box office bonus.