Scary Movie opens with $55M, tops its franchise, and still lands a 24% critics score

A $55 million opening can make even the most skepticism-prone execs blink. Scary Movie, the latest entry in the spoof franchise, debuted at No. 1 with $55 million, the best opening the series has ever posted. And yes, that same weekend also came with a harsh review reality check: the film earned a 24% with critics who ventured out to cover it.

That juxtaposition is the whole story, and it matters because it happens in a market that does not usually reward “bad reviews” with “huge first weekend” unless something else is doing the heavy lifting. Paramount got the one number it wanted, according to the report, and the film’s opening is all the more notable given what the studio reportedly tried to avoid: it “apparently tried to stave off negative reviews by not screening the film for critics” for the second film in a row after Passenger. Reviews were not great, but the theater receipts arrived anyway, and the franchise is now over the $1 billion milestone.

The report also gives you the franchise math that explains why this is less random than it looks. The Wayans returned to the parody franchise they spawned in 2000 for the first time in 25 years. The initial Scary Movie opened to $42.3 million and grossed over $157 million domestic and $278 million worldwide. The sequel then stepped away, roughly halving that business for its era. Scary Movie 3 and 4 came back under David Zucker, an originator associated with Airplane!, Top Secret and The Naked Gun. Those opened to $48.1 million and $40.2 million, respectively, then delivered a combined $200 million domestic and nearly $400 million worldwide.

Then came Scary Movie 5, directed by Malcolm D. Lee, which in 2013 got savage reviews (4% on the Tomatometer) while still grossing $32 million domestic. Those earlier films were released under the eye of the Weinsteins, which is a small but important signal for today’s executives: distribution partners, marketing choices, and release-day “review exposure” can shift outcomes even when the critical consensus stays ugly. The Scary Movie 6 version of that dynamic includes the same reported playbook around not screening critics. In other words, Paramount is treating reviews like an input it can manage, not a verdict it must obey.

The quality curve across the franchise is brutal. The original Scary Movie hit 51% with critics. The Zucker films landed 36% and 37%. Scary Movie 2 got 15%. Scary Movie 5 received 4%, placing it near the bottom among films opening in over 3,000 theaters, with the report listing Battlefield Earth, Jack and Jill, and Vampires Suck among the worst-reviewed comparables. Yet despite that history, Scary Movie now gets to brag about franchise-level profit power too. The report says that with an additional $50.5 million across the world, Scary Movie is “officially a billion-dollar franchise.” For boardrooms, that is the uncomfortable lesson: a franchise can become a money machine even when critics keep swatting it.

And while Scary Movie is the headline act, the same weekend also hands executives a second signal: low-to-mid review performance and modest opening can still be survivable if the product finds an audience later, or if it already has a base. Masters of the Universe debuted in second place with $29.3 million, despite reviews that were reasonably positive (66%). It is framed as a toy line and animated series that has not exactly moved into the lexicon of post-1980s generations, and the film is compared against other June openings that failed to reach $100 million. Meanwhile, the report notes that a He-Man movie scored 17% for the 1987 Cannon production starring Dolph Lundgren, and that the new version is doing better than that reference point, even if it is still not hitting the kind of global scale a $170 million production would typically want.

On the horror side, Backrooms (a 10 million production) opened to over $81 million and then fell 67% in its sophomore frame to $25.9 million. The report says it made $135 million in its first 10 days and is already over $212 million worldwide, making it the highest-grossing release in A24’s history. That means this weekend’s data points are consistent with a broader pattern: genre can convert hype into revenue quickly, even if the afterimage of reviews or audience drops still matters.

Finally, Obsession offers executives a more subtle operating lesson. The report highlights that for the first time in its theatrical run, Obsession had a lower weekend than the previous one, down just 7%. Another $25.6 million in its fourth weekend brings it to $152.1 million in 24 days, and the film is already over $200 million domestic and over $224 million globally. There is even a specific comparison to other films around weekend four, including Top Gun: Maverick and Titanic as examples of high fourth-weekend drops being less steep in percentage terms. The message is simple: studios and distributors should not only model opening-weekend outcomes. The long tail can be the difference between a film that “fails” on day one and one that prints cash by day 30.

So what should executives take from all of this? Scary Movie proves brand gravity can overpower a 24% critics score and reported critic screening avoidance can still align with audience behavior. But Masters of the Universe, Backrooms, and Obsession show that the winning strategy is not one-size-fits-all: some properties need early validation, some need time, and some need genre momentum. For peers making greenlight and release decisions, the strategic stake is clear: the market is punishing for weak openings, but it rewards the right combination of franchise depth, audience targeting, and distribution choices that keep the cash register ringing even when critics do not show up for the party.