In the North American film market on the first weekend of 2024, only one new film will be released on a large scale. The horror film "Night Swim" produced by Universal Pictures opened with a box office of US$12 million in 3,250 theaters. It failed to surpass "Wonka" which was released on New Year's Eve and could only rank second on the weekend box office list. Bit.

"Dark Swimming" is the first big screen work written and directed by Bryce McGuire. However, the two producers of the film have great backgrounds. They are director James Wan, who created the "Saw" series, and Jason Blum, the boss of Blumhouse Films, a major Hollywood horror film company. . The film tells the story of a haunted house in an American backyard swimming pool. It does not seem to have much new ideas. Currently, on the film review website "Rotten Tomatoes", the overall score of more than 100 film critics is only 22% fresh, which is quite Not favored.

"Dark Swimming" Poster

Moreover, in addition to its worrying quality, "Dark Swimming" also lacked sufficient marketing arrangements before its release. The total number of views of its related advertisements on social media platforms such as Facebook, X, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok was only 2023. It’s less than half as popular as the horror movies Five Nights at Freddy’s and Megan Thee Stallion . Of course, the opening box office of US$12 million is not an unacceptable result for such a low-cost horror film with a production cost of only US$15 million. Although the reputation is poor, it should not be a problem to make profits in the end.

Compared with its own gains and losses, what may be more worth mentioning is the company story behind the film. Just on January 2 this year, Blumhouse Films and Atomic Monster, owned by James Wan, announced their official merger. "Dark Swimming" is the first work after this strong alliance. The initial cooperation between the two parties was "Meghan", which was released in early 2023. At that time, Jason Blum and James Wan both supervised the production, and also revealed that their respective companies were expected to merge soon. Afterwards, the two co-produced "Insidious 5: Red Door", which will be released in July 2023. After the merger is officially completed, the two parties will continue to maintain their independent brand images, but will share resources and infrastructure.

Bloom House Film Company, founded in 2000, owns several successful horror film series IPs such as "The Haunted Man", "Happy Death Day" and "The Purge". In recent years, it has also participated in the production of "Moonlight". "Panic" and "The Exorcist" and other old IP reboot work. As for Atomic Beast Films on the other side, it was established exactly ten years later than the former, but it also has high-quality resources in multiple series such as "The Conjuring", "Insidious" and "Saw".

According to incomplete statistics, the combined global box office of the films produced by the two companies was US$11.6 billion. Some media insiders analyzed that after the merger, the speed of film production by the two companies will be significantly faster than before. On the other hand, Bloom House Film Company's works in the past few years have been distributed by Universal Pictures, which has also brought huge profits to the latter. This contract will expire this summer. It remains to be seen whether we will continue to cooperate or switch to another company for distribution in the future, but the entry of James Wan and Atomic Beast Films will definitely bring a lot of changes to this new contract.

At the beginning of the new year, Hollywood media also made an outlook for the full-year box office in 2024. Basically, everyone agrees with the $8 billion forecast given by British box office research company Gower Street Analytics. According to the "Hollywood Reporter", a major Hollywood company found through research that many Americans who had the habit of going to theaters to watch movies before the epidemic have not resumed this habit. In terms of proportion, roughly every five One person in the audience was like this. As for when this original audience will regain the hobby of watching movies on the big screen before 2020, or simply stop going to theaters altogether, the answer is yet to be determined.

In the past three days, that is, the first weekend of 2024, the total box office in the North American market was approximately US$88 million. Compared with the first weekend of 2023, when "Avatar 2" was released, it dropped by nearly 20%. In other words, even if a low-cost original work like "Dark Swimming" has a better reputation and a higher box office, it may not help. If you really want to drive the entire North American market, you still need commercial blockbusters with strong topics, and this is exactly what Hollywood lacks the most today.

After all, this weekend's box office champion is "Wonka," which has been in theaters for a month. The film has won the top spot for the fourth time. The current total box office in North America has reached 164 million U.S. dollars, and the global box office has exceeded 400 million U.S. dollars. Starting from "Barbie" and "Oppenheimer" released in July 2023, after that, the only blockbuster that can achieve a global box office of more than 400 million US dollars is "Wonka". This also illustrates from the side how difficult it is to create a hit in Hollywood, where commercial blockbusters are constantly emerging.