Ti West‘s new slasher movie X was released by A24 in theaters on Thursday, March 17, scaring up $4.4 million in its opening weekend across 2,865 theaters in the United States.
In its second weekend of release, X has fallen to the #6 spot on the box office charts, with the current domestic total at $8,298,028 and the worldwide total at $8,690,944.
It’s likely at this point that the film will eventually hit $10 million at the global box office, which is not too shabby for such a wildly niche horror movie release from A24.
The good news here is that a prequel to X has been ordered and in fact it’s already been filmed, with a follow-up titled Pearl teased after the end credits of X in theaters. Rather than a post-credits scene we were treated to an entire teaser trailer, with the upcoming Pearl centered on the movie’s villain. Mia Goth will reprise the role of Pearl, the film set decades prior to X.
West tells Bloody Disgusting, “I’m very grateful for A24 having done this. Part of the idea of this movie that’s cool to me is that there is a bigger thing to it all. What I can tell you about Pearl, because we’ve already made it and it’s done, is it is very much a story about Pearl. So you will learn more about her. It is stylistically very different from X. You do not need one without the other, but they enrich each other in a specific way. In the way that X is affected, let’s say by 1970s horror independent filmmaking and Americana cinema, Pearl is influenced by a very different era of filmmaking. If we do the third one, it will be affected by a different type of cinema.”
“It’s been amazing. If [A24] didn’t like the script, we just wouldn’t have made the movie,” West adds. “They were the only people to make it with. I was in quarantine for two weeks in New Zealand when I wrote Pearl, with this idea of, ‘I don’t know if I could convince them to do it, but if I could write something good enough,’ and Mia [Goth] and I would collaborate over FaceTime. I was like, ‘If we can get something that’s undeniably good enough. If they really believe in this like they say they do, they’ll do it.’ Then A24 called. They believed in it, and we’ve made the second one.
“I’m excited for you to see Pearl in the near future.”
[Related] The Surprising Emotional Horror of Ti West’s ‘X’
