Here to hopefully add a new chapter to 2026’s horror boom is Evil Dead Burn, the first film in the franchise to hit big screens since Evil Dead Rise, which opened to $24.5M and topped out at $67.2M in 2023.
So far this year, audiences have shown a marked interest in original horror titles from first-time directors, with Kane Parsons’ Backrooms giving distributor A24 its best opening weekend ever with $81.4M, Mark Fischbach’s Iron Lung opening to $17.8M despite being self-distributed, and Curry Barker’s Obsession ($17.1M domestic opening) still holding strong in the top five a month and a half into its release. Though Evil Dead Burn is neither based on original IP nor directed by a first-timer, it’s close on both counts; as a standalone spinoff, the story and characters seem to be original, and though director Sébastien Vanicek did direct an earlier feature (2023’s Infested), it went straight to streaming on Shudder, making this his highest-profile project by a mile.
One strong comp for this release—as a stand-alone entry in a classic horror franchise getting a summer release—is 2024’s Alien: Romulus ($42M domestic opening), which coincidentally was directed by Fede Alvarez, who directed 2013’s Evil Dead reboot ($25.7M domestic opening). Also slightly ahead of the $30M – $40M debut Evil Dead Burn is tracking is last year’s Weapons ($43.5M), also a Warner Bros. horror summer release from a director on his second feature.
