Why Is Halloween Weekend So Slow at the Box Office? Last Year’s Was Reported as the Weakest in 30+ Years, This Year’s Saturday Halloween Has No Major Opener, and I Think the Quiet Is Actually Doing Movies a Favor

Every year around now, somebody in the movie business quietly pencils in a slow weekend, and every year the rest of us act surprised. This year Halloween lands on a Saturday, nobody is opening a big movie against the trick-or-treaters, and the forecasts for Oct. 30–Nov. 1 read like a polite shrug. Which, honestly, is the part I find interesting.

Last year’s Halloween weekend was reported as the weakest in more than three decades, so I did three things here. I pulled the real numbers from last year, lined up the forecasts for this weekend, and built a scorecard of my own for why theaters go quiet every Oct. 31. If you’ve been searching for why Halloween weekend is so slow at the box office, what’s actually opening, or whether it’s a good weekend to go to a theater, it’s all below. Everything here is as of Friday, Oct. 30, and the weekend hasn’t happened yet, so every 2026 figure in this story is a forecast, not a result.

What this weekend looks like

Todd Thatcher’s weekend forecast puts it plainly: Halloween is typically a quiet time at the box office, and with the holiday on a Saturday, the only notable newcomer he lists is Christmas at the Kringles. He also mentions a comedic horror release from Briarcliff on about 1,800 screens, which he figures will land around $2 million to $2.5 million, outside his top five. Gold Derby reaches the same place from another angle: it says no major studio dares open against trick-or-treaters, so the top five will be holdovers. Boxoffice Pro describes The Mosquito Bowl and Christmas at the Kringles as the weaker newcomers.

That sets up a rematch. Clayface, the Warner Bros. and DC Studios body-horror origin story, won last weekend with $24 million and an A- CinemaScore, according to Gold Derby. A24’s Elizabeth Holmes documentary, You Can See Everything, was second with $19.5 million after a 25% jump in its second weekend, and Gold Derby says it has beaten its forecast every week since opening. I covered both in more detail in my Clayface box office story and my You Can See Everything box office story.

Look at the top of that table. Even in Thatcher’s forecast, where Clayface wins, the gap between No. 1 and No. 2 is about $600,000, which is a rounding error in box office terms. That’s exactly why this weekend is more fun to watch than it looks on paper.

What happened last Halloween weekend

Last year Halloween fell on a Friday. The weekend of Oct. 31–Nov. 2, 2025 had no new wide tentpole, and two modestly sized movies ended up fighting for first place. On Sunday, Paramount’s Regretting You reported an estimated $8.1 million and Universal’s Black Phone 2 an estimated $8 million, and Comscore gave first place to Regretting You, according to the Associated Press. Box Office Mojo’s actuals flipped it: Black Phone 2 took first with about $8.3 million and Regretting You finished second with about $7.8 million.

The total is where the headlines came from. Comscore’s first read put the whole weekend at $49.8 million, the lowest-grossing Halloween weekend in more than 30 years, and The Hollywood Reporter noted the last time it was this low was 1993, at $49.2 million unadjusted. Gold Derby then updated its own story: Sunday’s totals came in higher, at $55.5 million, which made it the fourth-lowest weekend of 2025 instead of the lowest. In this week’s preview, Gold Derby still describes that $55.5 million as the lowest in more than 30 years. So the exact number moved, but the story didn’t.

It wasn’t just one weekend. Reports said October 2025 finished around $425 million, the lowest October since 1997 if you set aside 2020. The explanations people gave were a pile-up: Halloween on a Friday sending families out trick-or-treating, the baseball championship series, a crowd of streaming premieres, and the major distributors skipping the weekend. Analyst Paul Dergarabedian told the AP the audience was “truly fragmented,” and I think that two-word diagnosis is the best one anyone offered.

One more detail I liked. A 40th anniversary re-release of Back to the Future cracked the top 10 at about $4.7 million on Sunday, according to a report citing Box Office Mojo. To me that says nostalgia is one of the few things that travels well on a night like this, because it asks so little of you. You already know you love it.

The first three figures are from the Halloween 2025 reports above. The last is the whole market on last weekend, per Box Office Mojo’s weekend table, and it’s here so you can see how far one calendar flip can swing things.

My five-reason scorecard: why theaters go quiet on Halloween

I built this table myself because every story about a slow Halloween says “people are busy” and stops there. That’s true, but it’s not very useful. The “what the reporting says” column comes from the sources linked below; the weights in the last column are my own judgment calls, and you’re free to argue with them.

The row that surprised me while building this was the horror one. You’d think the one weekend of the year built for scary movies would be their best, and for a lot of people it’s the opposite. A horror fan on Halloween has better things to do than watch someone else’s Halloween.

The math behind a quiet weekend

Here’s a little arithmetic of my own. Last weekend, the top five movies on Thatcher’s list grossed $69.9 million combined ($24 million, $19.5 million, $12.2 million, $8.5 million and $5.7 million). Thatcher’s forecast for the same five this weekend adds up to $42.4 million. That’s a drop of about 39%, and the bars below show how it splits by film.

The pattern is the part worth noticing. The newest, flashiest movie takes the biggest hit, and the movies with the best word of mouth hold best. Street Fighter was already down 72% in its second weekend, so a forecast of another big fall isn’t shocking. Wicker and the two A-grade holdovers are expected to slide the least.

If you’re going anyway: my pick order

Here is how I’d order the movies in the top five for a Halloween weekend theater trip. I’m ranking these on public numbers and word of mouth, not on my own viewing, and the order is a matter of taste.

1. 1

   Wildwood

   Best word of mouth · Laika

   Boxoffice Pro cites a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score, a 97% audience score and an A CinemaScore, the best set of numbers in the top five. It made $12.2 million last weekend, and Boxoffice Pro expects it to stay in the top three.

2. 2

   You Can See Everything

   Best momentum · A24 documentary

   A documentary that rose 25% in its second weekend is rare, and it sits at about $45.1 million domestic, according to Gold Derby. Pick it if you want something to argue about on the drive home.

3. 3

   Clayface

   Best Halloween mood · Warner Bros. and DC Studios

   An A- CinemaScore and a $24 million opening make it a solid crowd choice, and the body-horror tone fits the night. It’s also the one most exposed to the holiday slump, per Gold Derby’s read on horror.

4. 4

   Wicker

   Best sleeper · Olivia Colman and Alexander Skarsgård

   It made $5.7 million last weekend, and Thatcher says it built a strong following among women. JoBlo called it a sleeper hit. If the big names don’t grab you, this is the one with the most room to surprise.

If you’d rather spend Halloween night in a theater the old-fashioned way, my story on the Terrifier trilogy returning to theaters covers which night to pick.

My take: the quiet is doing movies a favor

I know the headline version of this story is gloomy: worst Halloween in 30 years last year, and now another sleepy one. I don’t fully buy the gloom. Look at what a weekend with no big opener does. It stops hiding the movies that have legs. A documentary that climbs in its second weekend, an animated movie holding a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score and an A CinemaScore, a horror story hoping genre fans show up despite the holiday: those are the stories a blockbuster weekend would bury.

So when studios skip Halloween, I don’t read it as cowardice. I read it as maybe the smartest scheduling call on the whole calendar, and I wish more weekends worked this way. A week ago the whole market did $100.4 million. Thatcher’s numbers take about 39% off the top five in the same theaters, in the same month, one calendar flip later. To me that doesn’t say the box office is broken. It says the box office is calendar-sensitive, and that’s a much easier problem to live with.

My pick for No. 1 is You Can See Everything. I have three reasons: Gold Derby says it has beaten its forecast every week, JoBlo reports its theater count expanding past 3,000, and horror is the genre with the holiday handicap. Call it a lean, not a lock, because the gap between the top two forecasts is smaller than most weekend-to-weekend noise. If you go to a theater, go because you want to see the movie. This is the one weekend where you won’t have to fight anyone for a seat.

Quick answers people are searching for