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Universal, Blumhouse and co-producer James Wan took us for a Night Swim in theaters over the weekend, with the Bryce McGuire-directed horror movie becoming the genre’s very first theatrical release of the new year. Was it a strong start for the horror genre, you ask?
Night Swim debuted in 3,250 theaters across the United States over the weekend, opening to $12 million domestically. Worldwide, the film scared up $17.6 million in its debut.
Here’s the day-to-day breakdown here in the United States:
- Friday, January 5: $5,250,000
- Saturday, January 6: $4,180,000
- Sunday, January 7: $2,570,000
For the sake of comparison, Blumhouse’s M3GAN was released in January of last year, and the viral appeal of the title character drove the film to a $30 million domestic opening. Granted, nobody in their right mind expected Night Swim to perform the way M3GAN did.
Other recent Blumhouse releases and their domestic opening weekend totals include Five Nights at Freddy’s ($80 million), The Exorcist: Believer ($26 million), and Insidious: The Red Door ($33 million). The good news for Night Swim? The production budget was just $15 million, so it only needs to make somewhere in the ballpark of $40 million to turn a profit.
The bad news? Reviews for Night Swim haven’t been great. Meagan Navarro wrote in her review for Bloody Disgusting, “Almost a decade later, McGuire’s feature expansion [of his short film, also titled Night Swim] showcases more ways to mine terror from the aquatic concept, buoyed by a great cast, but a familiar formula and simplified mythology threaten to sink it all.”
Based on the acclaimed 2014 short film by Rod Blackhurst and Bryce McGuire, the film stars Wyatt Russell (The Falcon and the Winter Soldier) as Ray Waller, a former major league baseball player forced into early retirement by a degenerative illness, who moves into a new home with his concerned wife Eve (Oscar® nominee Kerry Condon, The Banshees of Inisherin), teenage daughter Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle, this fall’s The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes) and young son Elliot (Gavin Warren, Fear the Walking Dead).
Secretly hoping, against the odds, to return to pro ball, Ray persuades Eve that the new home’s shimmering backyard swimming pool will be fun for the kids and provide physical therapy for him. But a dark secret in the home’s past will unleash a malevolent force that will drag the family under, into the depths of inescapable terror.
Night Swim is written and directed by Bryce McGuire (writer of the upcoming film Baghead) and is produced by James Wan, the filmmaker behind the Saw, Insidious and The Conjuring franchises, and Jason Blum, the producer of the Halloween films, The Black Phone and The Invisible Man. The film is executive produced by Michael Clear and Judson Scott for Wan’s Atomic Monster and by Ryan Turek for Blum’s Blumhouse.
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