Opening Weekend Forecast: £200K – £300K
Theatrical Total Forecast: £500K – £1M
Cinema advertising company Pearl & Dean has released their predicted opening range for Passenger, opening in the U.K. and Ireland this weekend.
Director André Øvredal’s Passenger has the makings of a crowd-pleasing horror title, with a strong premise in which a demonic presence stalks road trippers along a wooded stretch of highway.
The film concept evokes the disorienting dread of The Blair Witch Project with the forward momentum of Speed, and as with Blair Witch, Paramount has tied Passenger real-world anxieties with its tagline: “130 Million People Take Road Trips Every Year… 15,400 of them are never seen again.” Paired with a genuinely unsettling trailer, which has generated 13.3 million views across Paramount’s U.S. and U.K. YouTube channels, the title has a credible chance of cutting through with audiences.
That said, we are not currently predicting Passenger to break out in a significant way thanks to a congested May horror market that has Passenger up against Hokum, Obsession, and Backrooms, as well as April holdovers such as Lee Cronin’s The Mummy and Exit 8. Several of these titles enter the market with stronger audience recognition than Passenger: Backrooms is adapted by Kane Parsons from his viral YouTube shorts, some of which have surpassed 70 million views, and Obsession, following a man who wishes his crush would fall madly in love with him, has attracted attention for its high concept romantic spin on the classic monkey’s paw story. Passenger also doesn’t have a highly recognizable actor in its starring role, something that helped Hokum, starring Adam Scott, to reach £1.56 million in its first two weeks.
At this stage, Passenger appears more likely to track in line with last month’s sound-driven horror Undertone, which underperformed at £571,000; last year’s Bring Her Back or Hallow Road at £1.8 million and £206,000 respectively; or Paramount’s January release Primate at £1.3 million.
Comps: Bring Her Back (£1.8 million), Hokum (£1.6 million), Primate (£1.3 million), Late Night With The Devil (802,108), Undertone (£571,000), Hallow Road (£206,371)
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