The Conjuring: Last Rites “scared up,” as box office lingo says, one of the best opening weekends for a horror movie of all time with a $187 million global haul, nearly quadrupling its budget instantly.
Is it…actually good? Depends on who you ask, and while critics say one thing, its audience members who have the final say, and I think that’s a story worth laying out. I have sorted the Conjuring Universe, which includes two sets of spin-off films, into the top-rated ones, and as it turned out, with a tiebreaker, Last Rites is the lowest ranked one. But it’s about to be the most profitable in a short period of time. Here’s the list.
- The Conjuring – 86% critic score, 83% audience score
- The Conjuring 2 – 80% critic score, 82% audience score
- Anabelle: Creation – 70% critic score, 68% audience score
- Anabelle Comes Home – 64% critic score, 70% audience score
- The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It – 56% critic score, 83% audience score
- The Conjuring: Last Rites – 56% critic score, 79% audience score
- The Nun II – 51% critic score, 72% audience score
- Annabelle – 28% critic score, 35% audience score
- The Nun – 24% critic score, 35% audience score
Some interesting things to note here is that while the first installments of The Nun and Annabelle were disasters with both critics and audiences, their sequels mostly got their act together and produced better films. The other story is that despite a wide range of critic scores with a 30% difference between them, audience scores for all Conjuring movies is between a 79% and an 83%
Now, let’s do box office, leaving out Last Rites as it’s only getting started. This is wild:
- The Nun – $366 million
- The Conjuring 2 – $322 million
- The Conjuring – $320 million
- Anabelle: Creation – $306 million
- The Nun II – $261 million
- Annabelle – $257 million
- Anabelle Comes Home – $231 million
- The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It – $206 million
Wait, what? This list is bizarre. You’re telling me that of all the movies in The Conjuring universe the worst one, The Nun, is the highest earning? That’s weird in the first place, but secondly, The lowest-earning Conjuring movie, the one before this, The Devil Made Me Do It, with identical critic and audience scores, is only $20 million above just the opening weekend of The Conjuring: Last Rites. Now, Last Rites seems like it will probably easily sail to $400 million or more, and if it does, it will be in the top 10 highest-earning horror movies ever. $500 million would put it inside the top 5.
The only thing I can think of here is that there’s some sort of “Avengers: Endgame” effect going on here, where Last Rites is pitched as the final end of The Conjuring universe that all past fans wanted to show up for, even if they’d dipped in and out of the series. I don’t actually believe this will be the last Conjuring movie, given how much it and its spin-offs earn, but that’s my best guess.
I don’t get it. I’m glad people are liking it, but I just don’t get it.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
