Scream 6's social media domination has eclipsed that of even the viral killer doll hit M3GAN. Blumhouse and Universal brought M3GAN to theaters on January 6 and score a huge hit after breaking the Internet in December with the film's first trailer. A clip of M3GAN dancing while menacing the character played by Ronny Chieng became a huge meme almost overnight, to the point that a troupe of dancers were hired to recreate it at the film's premiere. The box office responded well to this outpouring of love, and the film earned nearly $100 million in the U.S.
Per Deadline, analytics from RelishMix reveal that the social media pull of the newly released slasher sequel Scream 6 is even stronger than M3GAN's. The Scream 2022 sequel's campaign was wide-reaching, ranging from playful memes like a Guess Who game featuring the film's potential suspects to taking on the voice of the Ghostface killer and taunting star Jenna Ortega. This resulted in a reach of around 360.8 million people, a solid 30 million over M3GAN's 330.3 million and 2.4 times higher than the average horror project.
Horror's Hot Streak Continues To Outdo Itself With Scream 6
Scream 6's social media reach has also paid huge dividends at the box office. The film earned a whopping $44.5 million in its opening weekend despite competition from the Oscars telecast Sunday night. This is the strongest opening for any film in the entire Scream franchise, which originally premiered in 1996.
Scream 6's staggering gross and social media reach is doubling down on the hottest box office trend of the decade. Horror, which is typically a reliable box office presence, has been experiencing an even more tremendous boom in the past two years, from franchises to original successes like Nope, Smile, and Barbarian dominating 2022. M3GAN continued that trend in January, with Cocaine Bear picking up the baton in February and Scream 6 dominating this month.
After Scream 6, there are even more horror titles poised to take the gold in the coming months. It seems unlikely that all of them will have the outstanding success of Ghostface's latest adventure, but any one of them could strike major box office gold. This includes April's Evil Dead Rise and Renfield, June's The Boogeyman, July's Insidious: Fear the Dark, and September's The Nun 2.
Source: Deadline