Alien Makes Box Office Top 10 In 2024 Re-Release

One of the more notable events for Alien Day 2024 was the re-release of the original 1979 Alien, the 4K UHD remastered version, on the 26th of April and it’s following weekend in US for the film’s 45th anniversary. The re-release was quite successful and as Forbes magazine reports, the film managed to make the #10 spot for Friday’s box office.

Friday’s receipts have Alien in the #10 position with about $600,000, just behind Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire at $770,000 and just ahead of Dune: Part Two at $525,000. All three of these pictures will obviously top $1 million for the weekend, but we’ll have to wait for Saturday’s numbers to be certain this lineup remains.

The re-release was part of the promotional campaign and was timed especially to coincide with the annual Alien Day event. The article doesn’t take into account the timing being led by the yearly celebration for Alien fans, but it does offer additional speculation that the lack of new film releases that weekend could have helped Alien secure it’s position in the Top 10.

The article makes an interesting remark about 2024 being the year of re-releases which could’ve also been an additional beneficiary factor for the recent success of the Alien re-release.

The entire Spider-Man live-action franchise also began re-releases for 2024, for example, and this weekend also sees the re-release of the 1999 $416 million grosser The Mummy, which just missed this Friday’s top-10 with its $370,000 cue.

Later this summer, The Lord of the Rings trilogy also returns to theaters…

It is also noted that the previously mentioned weekend was also very concentrated with horror and monster films in general. That’s not even counting the other two R-rated films that don’t fit into this category: Boy Kills World and Civil War that fit into different genre categories.

But that’s only seven of the top 12. The rest are all horror and monster movies — Godzilla x Kong, Abigail, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, Alien, and The Mummy. Five horror films in the top 12 is quite a genre showing, especially for end of spring and the gateway into summer season.

Nostalgia towards established franchises seems to be at a high level. Will the audience’s craving for horror and monsters stay strong until August? Has the re-release of the 1979 Alien helped in advertising Alien: Romulus and in reminding viewers what splendid horrors await in that universe? We can only hope.

UPDATE:

Colider has just reported that Alien’s combined weekend box office results have removed the film from the Top 10 grossing films in the US over the aforementioned time period to the #11 spot, though still ahead of the re-release results for The Mummy.

Across the three-day weekend, Alien grossed $1.5 million with per-theater average of nearly $900. The movie finished just outside the top 10, narrowly falling short of the debutante action film Boy Kills World, which made $1.6 million in its first three days of release. Alien out-performed Universal’s 25th anniversary re-release of The Mummy, which grossed a hair over $1 million this weekend from around 1,200 nationwide theaters. By comparison, the recent Shrek 2 re-release grossed $1.4 million in its first weekend.

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