Indie cinema has two new bloodsoaked champions, and their names are Damien Leone and Art the Clown.
This weekend, the Christmas-themed horror threequel “Terrifier 3,” beat out the strong third weekend of Universal/DreamWorks’ “The Wild Robot” and the historically poor second weekend of Warner Bros.’ “Joker: Folie a Deux” to take the No. 1 spot at the box office with an $18.3 million opening weekend from 2,516 theaters.
It’s the fourth-highest opening weekend for a horror film this year, topping movies like Universal/Blumhouse’s “Speak No Evil” and “Night Swim” as well as Lionsgate’s “Never Let Go” and “The Strangers — Chapter 1.”
It’s a weekend that has floored Chris McGurk, CEO of the company that distributed “Terrifier 3,” Cineverse. Formerly known as Cinedigm and owner of dozens of bespoke streaming services and media companies, including the popular horror media group Bloody Disgusting, Cineverse spent just $500,000 out of pocket on marketing “Terrifier 3,” a slasher sequels that resurrects Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton) for more gory antics, on top of the mere $2 million production budget for the film.
“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 actually do over $18 million and to win the weekend amongst all those studio tentpoles is just really unbelievable. It’s another really great shot in the arm for independent film to see a little movie like this that was produced at that budget level and marketed the way we marketed it win the day.”
McGurk talked about the years of work by the Cineverse and Bloody Disgusting that went into turning “Terrifier” into a new hit slasher series, as well as trying to expand interest in Art the Clown’s gory antics beyond the most hardcore of horror fans.
Let’s go back two years ago to “Terrifier 2,” which really established the foundation for this opening weekend to happen. Tell us how this film came about and how Cineverse and Bloody Disgusting were able to grow this fanbase.
We were lucky enough to buy two horror assets over the years. One was Bloody Disgusting in 2021, and they’re the biggest name in online horror with editorial, reviews, festivals, that kind of thing, 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 searching for horror properties for us, and they knew of this 2016 direct-to-video film called “Terrifer.” It didn’t do all that great, but it really caught fire online. So the Bloody Disgusting guys said to us, “You know, there’s this franchise that could have the next Freddy Krueger with this character, Art the Clown. We really should buy it and release 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 kind of did it as a stunt release. We’re a streaming company with 30 channels tailored to different audiences, and any film releases are in service to that. The initial plan with “Terrifier 2” was just to put it in theaters with Iconic Events for a weekend and then release it on ScreamBox. But then it just exploded and made $1.2 million that weekend and we thought that we really underestimated it.
From there, we ended up making over $10 million over six weekends, and there’s a lot of credit due to Bloody Disgusting for guiding the viral marketing, which led to interviews with Howard Stern and The New York Times. We got probably $5 million in media value from all that coverage but we only spent $250,000 out of pocket. So when it came time to do the third film, we knew we had something big for theaters and did a lot more pre-planning for “Terrifier 3.”
And what went into that pre-planning? What did you learn from “Terrifier 2” that went into the prep for “Terrifier 3”?
The first thing, the thing we learned more than anything, was the power of our ecosystem. We have 30 bespoke channels with 800 million viewers we can market to. We have over 40 podcasts in our podcast network, and we had to leverage it as much as we could. We also built an ad sales team and technology we own ourselves that helps us identify where the fans are and how we can market to them in the most effective way.
But the second thing, I think overall, was the positioning of this movie. Now, you know, the last time, we clearly got all the hardcore slasher and gore fans to go. Our whole goal this time was to focus on the dark humor and the camp of the films and turn Art the Clown into the next Freddy like the Bloody Disgusting guys thought he could be. Focus on the scares and the humor more than the gore, because the gore fans are already going to come in. So we tried to market to the audience that might tag along with those gore fans, a more female crowd and Hispanic and African-American audiences as well.
It sounds a bit like selling a really spicy hot sauce. Lots of people love spicy food, but only a certain number of them love really setting their tongues on fire, so you’ve got to sell to everyone else how good the sauce tastes.
Yeah, sort of like that. We really wanted to eventize the movie, daring people to see it in a group because you don’t want to be left out of the conversation. And it paid off because we saw heavy group turnouts where people were showing up in groups of nine or 10.
Some horror films just keep going for weeks while others, while turning a profit on opening weekend, end up not extending beyond that core audience. From 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 already turned a huge profit. But the fans absolutely love this film. We have a 90% Rotten Tomatoes score with the audience, and it is clear from the $18 million that we’ve already expanded the audience, especially with women and with the huge group turnout. And I think that on top of that, the fact that we’re the No. 1 movie in America’s going to help even further increase the curiosity factor. We’re the Little Engine That Could and I think that’s going to bring in newcomers who are going to dare to see if they can watch this movie.
And there’s a chance this only gets bigger, because the film ends with a clear sequel hook.
You know, Damien has said there are one or two more in him. I think he actually said there might be a fifth. What’s unique about this is it’s completely, totally, 100% his vision, with no studio interference or anything. From the beginning, our thing was, “Come with us, we’ll be able to market this movie and distribute it, but it’s your movie, uncut and unrated.” I don’t think anybody else out there has the guts to do that. So we’re letting Damien realize all of his creative ambitions here, he’s done a fantastic job so far. I think he’s very, very focused on the full arc of this franchise, so hopefully in the few months you’ll see an announcement or two in that space.
“Terrifier” is absolutely its own beast like any hit film, but as you said, you have a whole network of podcasts and streaming platforms catering to different interests. After what Cineverse has done with “Terrifier,” are you looking at trying to find breakout hits in other genres?
I think the verticals we’re strong in besides horror are anime/Asian content, family content — we have a platform called Dove that is family focused — and children’s content like “Barney” and “Garfield.” We’re actively searching for content in those verticals, but as you can imagine it is horror where we’ve got people knocking on the door with movies right now.
We kind of got out of the theatrical releasing business after we had this movie in 2013 called “Short Term 12” which was a critical darling. I have the Golden Tomato award in my office because it was the best reviewed movie on Rotten Tomatoes that year. It was directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, who does Marvel movies now, and it had Brie Larson, Rami Malek and LaKeith Stanfield all in the movie. The film helped make all their careers and the whole thing, but we released it theatrically and had to spend a couple million dollars to release it, and we lost a lot of money in the movie.
So we pulled out of theaters and pivoted to building up this streaming network, and it turns out, as “Terrifier” showed us, that we’re in a better position to release theatrically now because of the marketing and home platform structure that we have built up. Now that we have that in place, we’re much more confident about our ability to try to do these other verticals. We’re actively looking for other content to follow this model and to say to other independent studios, “Come to us and we’ll help market your movies in what we think is a much smarter, targeted and much more effective way.” In that way, I think it’ll be a real positive for the independent film business.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
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