How ‘Nosferatu’ Drove a Stake Through Box Office Expectations With Huge $40 Million Christmas Debut

variety.com:

Rebecca Rubin Senior Film and Media Reporter Talk about having some bite. “Nosferatu” drove a stake through box office expectations, delivering a hauntingly good $21.1 million over the traditional weekend and $40.3 million since debuting on Christmas Day.

Those receipts sent box office analysts everywhere reaching for the vampire puns (apologies, apologies) in an effort to explain the bloody fantastic results for “Nosferatu.” After all, “Nosferatu” scored one of the year’s top openings from a specialty studio, joining A24’s dystopian cross-country adventure “Civil War” ($25 million), Neon’s thriller “Longlegs” ($22.4 million) and Cineverse’s ultra-gory slasher “Terrifier 3” ($18.9 million).

Ticket sales also rank as the biggest Christmas Day launch and weekend haul for a genre film, overtaking the benchmark set in 1998 by Robert Rodriguez’s high school sci-fi story “The Faculty” with $4.4 million on opening day and $11.6 million over the traditional weekend.

That there’s a 26-year gap between the previous record-holder is partially because horror isn’t synonymous with the holiday season. “When we dated the film for Christmas, people weren’t like, ‘Wow, that’s an easy fit.’ Exhibitors were taken aback that we were going to do this gothic story on Christmas Day,” says Lisa Bunnell, head of distribution at Focus Features, which backed the film. “We were able to turn it into an event, and it worked tremendously.