How ‘Terrifier 3’ beat ‘Joker 2’ at the box office with a $500,000 marketing budget

Indie cinema has two new blood-soaked champions, and their names are Damien Leone and Art the Clown.

This weekend, the third Christmas-themed horror sequel “Terrifier 3” bested the strong third weekend of Universal/DreamWorks’ “The Wild Robot” and the historically poor second weekend of Warner Bros.’ “Joker: Folie a Deux” will top the box office with an opening weekend of $18.3 million from 2,516 theaters.

It’s the fourth-highest opening weekend for a horror film this year, topping the likes of Universal/Blumhouse’s “Speak No Evil” and “Night Swim,” as well as “Never Let Go” and “The Strangers – Chapter 1” from Lionsgate.

It’s a weekend that has surprised Chris McGurk, CEO of the company that distributed “Terrifer 3”, Cineverse. Formerly known as Cinedigm and the owner of dozens of streaming services and media companies, including popular horror media group Bloody Disgusting, Cineverse spent just $500,000 out of pocket to market “Terrifier 3,” a sequel to slasher that resurrects Art the Clown (David Howard). Thornton) for more gory antics, in addition to the film’s production budget of just $2 million.

“David beat Goliath,” McGurk told TheWrap on Sunday. “Even if we had just made $5 million, we would have had a home run. $10 million would be the grand slam of grand slams. But to make more than $18 million and win the weekend among all those fields of ‘studio is really amazing. It’s another really great shot for independent cinema to see a small film like this produced on this level of budget and marketed the way we marketed it winning the day.’

McGurk discussed the years of work by Cineverse and Bloody Disgusting that turned “Terrifier” into a new series of slasher hits, as well as trying to broaden interest in Art the Clown’s gory antics beyond the diehards of horror fans.

Let’s go back two years to “Terrifer 2,” which really set the stage for this opening weekend. Tell us about how this film came about and how Cineverse and Bloody Disgusting were able to grow this fan base.

We were lucky enough to buy two horror assets over the years. One was Bloody Disgusting in 2021, and they are the biggest name in online horror with editorials, reviews, festivals, all done by great people who really understand the horror business. About seven months before that, we bought a streaming channel called ScreamBox, which I think is the number two horror streaming channel behind Shudder.

They were out there looking for horror properties for us, and they knew about this 2016 direct-to-video movie called “Terrifer.” It wasn’t great, but it really caught fire online. So the guys at Bloody Disgusting said to us, “You know, there’s this franchise that could have the next Freddy Krueger with this character, Art the Clown. We should really buy it and launch it.”

So they had a sequel produced for $250,000 by Damien Leone, who wrote and directed it, and his partner, Phil Falcone, and we went out and bought it and did it as a stunt release. We are a streaming company with 30 channels tailored to different audiences, and any movie premiere is at the service of this. The initial plan with “Terrifier 2” was to just put it in theaters with Iconic Events for one weekend and then release it on ScreamBox. But then it blew up and made $1.2 million that weekend and we thought we really underestimated it.

From there, we ended up making over $10 million over six weekends, and a lot of credit goes to Bloody Disgusting for guiding the viral marketing, which led to interviews with Howard Stern and The New York Times. We probably got $5 million in media value from all that coverage, but we only spent $250,000 out of pocket. So when it came time to make the third movie, we knew we had something big coming to theaters, and we did a lot more pre-planning for “Terrifier 3.”

And what went into this pre-planning? What did you learn from “Terrifier 2” that went into preparing for “Terrifier 3”?

The first thing we learned more than anything else was the power of our ecosystem. We have 30 bespoke channels with 800 million viewers to market to. We have over 40 podcasts in our podcast network and we had to use as many of them as we could. We’ve also built an ad sales team and technology that helps us identify where fans are and how we can most effectively market to them.

But the second thing, I think in general, was the positioning of this film. Now, you know, last time we clearly got all the slasher and gore fans. Our whole goal this time was to focus on the dark humor and camp of the films and make Art the Clown the next Freddy as the guys at Bloody Disgusting thought he could be. Focus on the scares and humor rather than the gore, because the gore fans will already be in. So we tried to market to the audience that I could tag with these gore fans, a more female and Hispanic and African-American audience. also the public.

It looks a bit like selling a really hot hot sauce. Many people love spicy food, but only a certain number of them love to set their tongues on fire, so you have to sell everyone else on the good taste of the sauce.

Yes, kind of like that. We really wanted to encourage the film, to dare people to watch it in groups because you don’t want to be left out of the conversation. And it paid off because we saw a great turnout in groups where people showed up in groups of nine or ten.

Some horror films only run for weeks, while others, while making a profit on their opening weekend, end up not extending beyond that core audience. Based on the data you’ve seen and with “Smile 2” coming next weekend, do you see any chance of “Terrifier 3” expanding its audience?

Absolutely! Now again, even if we don’t, we’ve still made a huge profit. But fans love this movie. We have a 90% Rotten Tomatoes score with the audience, and the $18 million shows that we’ve already expanded the audience, especially with the women and with the big group participation. And I think on top of that, the fact that we’re the No. 1 movie in the U.S. will help increase the curiosity factor even more. We are the little engine that could and I think that will bring new people who will dare to see if they can see this movie.

And there’s a chance that this will only get bigger, because the film ends with a clear sequel.

You know, Damien said there’s one or two more in him. I think he actually said there might be a fifth. What’s unique about it is that it’s completely, totally, 100% his vision, no studio interference or anything. From the beginning, our thing was, “Come with us, we can market this movie and distribute it, but it’s your movie, uncut and unrated.” I don’t think anyone else has the guts to do that. So let’s let Damien realize all his creative ambitions here, he’s done a fantastic job so far. I think it’s very, very focused on the full arc of that franchise, so hopefully in the next few months you’ll see an announcement or two in that space.

“Terrifier” is absolutely its own beast like any blockbuster movie, but like you said, you have a whole network of podcasts and streaming platforms that cater to different interests. After what Cineverse has done with “Terrifier,” are you looking to try to find major hits in other genres?

I think the verticals we’re strong in, besides horror, are anime/Asian content, family content (we have a family-focused platform called Dove), and children’s content like “Barney” and ” Garfield”. We’re actively looking for content in these sectors, but as you can imagine, it’s a nightmare where people are knocking on the door with movies right now.

We got out of the theatrical release business after we had this movie in 2013 called “Short Term 12,” which was a critical darling. I have the Golden Tomato award on my desk because it was the most reviewed film on Rotten Tomatoes that year. It was directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, who now makes Marvel movies, and had Brie Larson, Rami Malek, and LaKeith Stanfield all in the film. The movie helped make all his careers and everything, but we released it theatrically and we had to spend a couple of million dollars to release it, and we lost a lot of money on the movie.

So we went out of theaters and turned around to build this streaming network, and it turns out, as “Terridor” showed us, that we’re now in a better position to open in theaters because of the structure marketing and domestic platform that we have. built Now that we have that in place, we’re much more confident in our ability to try to do these other verticals. We’re actively looking for other content to follow this model and say to other indie studios, “Come to us and we’ll help you market your movies in a much smarter, more targeted and much more effective way.” In that way, I think it will be very positive for the independent film business.

This interview has been edited for clarity.