I was looking at production budgets versus the total worldwide lifetime gross so far this morning and noticed that horror movies, no matter how bad, are almost always a guaranteed money maker. They almost always recoup the budget and then go way over. Here’s some examples. Some of these movies were awesome and some awful, but in both cases you can plainly see it didn’t matter how bad it was.
| Movie | Budget | Gross |
|---|---|---|
| Darkness | $10.6 million | $34.4 million |
| The Ring | $48 million | $249.3 million |
| The Grudge | $10 million | $186.8 million |
| The Fog (2005) | $18 million | $25.5 million |
| Saw | $1.2 million | $102.9 million |
| Saw II | $4 million | $35 million (as of Oct. 30) |
| The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) | $9.5 million | $107 million |
| House of Wax (2005) | $40 million | $68 million |
| The Amityville Horror (2005) | $19 million | $103 million |
| The Blair Witch Project | $60,000 | $248.6 million |
| Jaws | $7 million | $470.6 million |
| The Exorcism of Emily Rose | $19 million | $79.4 million |
| Source: Box Office Mojo | ||
There are a lot more like this too that I didn’t list in the interest of space: Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, Open Water, Freddy vs. Jason, Halloween H20, etc.
So if you want to invest in something that will net a huge return, horror movies are apparently the way to go.
