While not all horror movies are a relatively reliable investment for movie studios and producers. While other genres can require immersive world-building, complex visual effects, and sprawling stories to work, horror has a reputation for its bare-bones efficiency. From Friday the 13th to Paranormal Activity, to The Blair Witch Project to 2023’s Skinamarink, plenty of projects have proven that filmmakers can get a blockbuster hit from an incredibly inexpensive movie. Provided the scares are there, horror audiences generally don't mind a low budget.
As such, while it is common to see great fantasy movies flop at the box office, this is not a regular occurrence in the horror genre. Horror movies tend to have lower budgets, so even if they fail, they usually recoup their costs. Not only that, but horror movies are also rarely expected to be major financial hits. This means that studios invest less money and marketing in them and their failure is seen as less of a problem when it does occur. That said, there are a handful of horror movies that disprove this rule. These horror movies failed so badly that they killed any interest in their franchises.
8 Predator 2
1990’s Predator 2 had an ingenious premise. After the original Predator pitted Arnie and a squad of tough soldiers against an invisible alien in the jungle, this sequel brought the eponymous monster to the concrete jungle of LA. Predator 2 deleted its connections to the original movie to start afresh and largely succeeded since the sequel was a gory, fun follow-up to its predecessor. However, this came at a high price. Predator 2 cost $12 million more than its predecessor and earned $31 million less. This killed any chance of a direct sequel, resulting instead in four reboots (Alien Vs Predator, Predators, The Predator, and Prey).
7 Van Helsing
Earning $300 million on a budget of $160 million doesn’t seem too bad, even with marketing costs taken into . However, this was disappointing enough to kill Van Helsing’s sequel plans back in 2004. Van Helsing boasted The Mummy director Stephen Sommers and a charismatic lead pairing in Kate Beckinsale and Hugh Jackman. However, the fun, light-hearted horror adventure was badly hurt by a jarringly bleak ending. This ill-fitting coda would have made the planned Van Helsing sequels hard to pull off even if the movie had not flopped upon release, but box office failure made this challenge an impossibility.
6 Grindhouse
Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino had ambitious plans for a sprawling Grindhouse universe that were killed by their movie’s lackluster reception in 2007. Tarantino’s criticisms of Scream rang hollow when Death Proof, his own attempt at a postmodern slasher, flopped at the box office. Meanwhile, Rodriguez’s darkly comedic Planet Terror failed to intrigue zombie fans despite arriving at the height of the sub-genre’s revival between 2004’s Dawn of the Dead remake and 2009’s Zombieland. Grindhouse cost somewhere between $55 and 65 million and earned just over $25 million, resulting in the spinoff Machete dropping its Grindhouse affiliation when the movie was released three years later.
5 Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation
1994’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation has an impressive pedigree. The sequel brought back the original 1974 cult classic’s co-screenwriter Kim Henkel and starred both Matthew McConaughey and Renée Zellweger before they were famous. However, this wasn’t enough to salvage the overly long, charmless, and thoroughly un-scary sequel, whose incomprehensible story saw Zellweger’s heroine taken hostage by a louder, more annoying Sawyer clan. Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation earned a meager $185,000 at the box office, which led the franchise’s creators to abandon sequels and reconfigure the series. The next time viewers saw a Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie, it was 2003’s divisive remake.
4 Jaws: The Revenge
1987’s Jaws: The Revenge features a shark that follows the movie’s heroine to the Bahamas to get revenge for the death of its brethren. Unsurprisingly, the sequel is famously the worst of the Jaws movies, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the movie was a complete financial catastrophe. Costing $23 million and making $50 million isn’t generally seen as a disaster, even when ing for Hollywood’s infamously creative methods of calculating profits. However, when compared to Jaws costing $9 million and making $476 million, it’s easy to see why Jaws: The Revenge killed the series (and the sequel's universally woeful reviews didn't help).
3 The Rage: Carrie 2
It took director Brian De Palma’s Stephen King adaptation Carrie over 20 years to receive a sequel. This, in retrospect, should have been seen as a red flag. However, when The Rage: Carrie 2 arrived in 1999, the studio was optimistic enough to spend $21 million on the long-awaited follow-up. However, like many lesser Stephen King horror adaptations, The Rage: Carrie 2 flopped upon release. The sequel earned only $17 million, ensuring that the franchise never received a third outing. Instead, producers opted to remake the original movie in 2013.
2 The Mummy
Infamously, the 2017 flop The Mummy killed the Dark Universe before the ambitious project even began. The action-horror hybrid was such a disaster that even the presence of one of Hollywood’s most reliable A-list stars, Tom Cruise, couldn’t salvage the movie. Loud, incoherent, and completely devoid of the charm that made 1999’s The Mummy an enduring classic, 2017’s The Mummy lost somewhere in the realm of $90 million upon release. In the years that ensued, projects ranging in tone from Renfield to 2020’s The Invisible Man attempted to salvage the remnants of the abandoned Dark Universe.
1 Gremlins 2: The New Batch
Gremlins 2: The New Batch was a zany, cartoony sequel that acted as both a direct follow-up to 1984’s darker Gremlins and a madcap parody of the original movie. Director Joe Dante let loose with the wild, unfettered sequel, which combined satire, slapstick, wordplay, and self-referential humor in an endlessly ambitious, self-reflexive meta-comedy. Unfortunately, viewers weren’t ready for this in 1990. Gremlins 2: The New Batch didn’t even earn back its $50 million budget, killing any prospect of Gremlins 3 with a $40 million payday. This ended the horror movie franchise entirely until Max’s TV spinoff Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai arrived 33 years later.
