As it should be, this month is a big one for horror movies, with new films, sequels and remakes all offering up delightful frights. Easily the biggest and most anticipated horror movie this month is David Gordon Green's Halloween reboot-quel. There are a lot of reasons to think that this movie is going to be a big hit when it opens this weekend, and now we have another accomplishment to add to the list, as Halloween is the highest pre-selling horror movie of 2018.
This impressive stat comes from Atom Tickets, where Halloween is the top horror pre-seller this year based on advance tickets sold through the platform in the two weeks prior to a film's opening. Beyond just the actual advance ticket sales indicating a high level of interest in Halloween, there is also a evidence that there is major awareness around the franchise that could drive its success.
Atom Tickets polled its users and found that 70% of its users have seen at least one Halloween movie and 48% of Latinx Atom users have seen all of the Halloween films. The poll also found that Latinx Atom users are twice as likely to see Halloween than other racial groups.
This is an important statistic and demographic because Latinx fans turn out for horror movies, and as we saw with The Nun, that group overcame the film's bad reviews to deliver the biggest hit yet in The Conjuring Universe. So Halloween can hope for that same audience to help drive its success, particularly since Halloween is enjoying much better reviews than The Nun.
Advance ticket sales aren't a surefire guarantee of box office success, as Solo: A Star Wars Story proved, but they aren't nothing either. This year has already been a big one for horror with buzzed about original titles like A Quiet Place and Hereditary and entries in popular existing franchises like The Nun and The First Purge all releasing.
So for Halloween to be the best pre-seller in a year full of great horror in the middle of the horror renaissance speaks to how excited people are to see this film, as they made the move to buy tickets in advance.
Halloween has a lot of factors going for it, like the fact that it is arriving at the perfect time, in advance of its namesake holiday. Also, Halloween has greater name recognition, brand awareness and longevity than the other horror films this year it beat in pre-sales and that all plays a part.
Atom Tickets also polled its users about the scariest movie killers and the top two were Michael Myers and Pennywise. We saw last year with IT just how powerful potent nostalgia mixed with great reviews and timing can be, and that bodes well for Halloween.
Halloween has been tracking between $50 million and $85 million, but CinemaBlend's own Eric Eisenberg thinks those numbers are way too low and Halloween will crack $100 million opening weekend. And with Atom Ticket's pre-sale news, evidence is mounting that he could be right.
We'll find out just how big Halloween will be when it opens in theaters this Friday, October 19. For all the year's biggest movies, check out our release schedule.
