The larger lesson for Hollywood here is that vampire movies just aren’t clicking with the moviegoing masses, and they frankly haven’t been for some time. “Twilight” becoming a $3.3 billion franchise is very much the exception, not the rule. For whatever reason, vampires as out-and-out horror fodder just aren’t bringing out audiences in meaningful numbers. As one recent example, 2022’s “The Invitation” ($33 million box office/$10 million budget) benefited from a small budget and a lack of competition, but its overall gross was still relatively small.
More often, we’re looking at stuff like “Morbius” ($167 million box office/$75 million budget), that couldn’t even leverage Marvel’s good name to garner success. Save for the “Hotel Transylvania” franchise, which is very much benefiting from being family-friendly, it’s been a while since a vampire movie hit it big at the box office. From what I can tell, we have to go back to “Underworld: Blood Wars” ($81 million box office/$35 million budget) in 2017, and that was part of an already-successful franchise.
Even going back a full decade to 2014’s “Dracula Untold” ($200 million box office/$70 million budget), the ceiling was relatively low on the biggest scale in the pre-pandemic era. The stuff that worked were indies such as “What We Do in the Shadows” or “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night,” which were both very small movies that ended up finding their audience over time. In the pandemic era? Vampire movies are truly having a hard time breaking through.
I’m not saying nobody should make vampire movies. We’ve got Robert Eggers’ “Nosferatu” coming later this year, and if all goes well, that may break the cycle. But it certainly needs to be understood that the appetite for these movies, generally speaking, is limited. Why exactly that is? It’s tough to say, but the numbers don’t lie.
“Abigail” is in theaters now.
