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Compared to a couple of years ago, where it seemed like almost any horror movie with a wide release could make a metaphorical killing at the box office, 2025 has been a little less of a boom year for the genre. Plenty of horror movies still come out on thousands of screens\u2014I co-host a horror podcast, and we\u2019ve had a mainstream new release to cover almost every week this year\u2014but they\u2019re not hitting as big as, say, 2023, which kicked off with M3GAN<\/a><\/em> doing nearly $100 million domestic, and saw big numbers for Scream VI<\/a><\/em>, Five Nights at Freddy\u2019s<\/a><\/em>, The Nun II<\/a><\/em>, Insidious: The Red Door<\/a><\/em>, Talk To Me<\/a><\/em>, Saw X<\/a><\/em>, and Thanksgiving<\/a><\/em>. Jump forward two years and we have Blumhouse undergoing a round of layoffs in the wake of M3GAN 2.0<\/a>\u2019<\/em>s entire box office run failing to match even the opening weekend of the earlier film.<\/p>\n Yet there have been plenty of horror admissions this year, despite middling-to-bad numbers for the likes of Bring Her Back<\/a><\/em>, The Woman in the Yard<\/a><\/em>, Wolf Man<\/a><\/em>, and I Know What You Did Last Summer<\/a><\/em>. (Some of those are good, too! Wolf Man<\/em> is underrated! Woman in the Yard<\/em> is masterfully made!) It\u2019s just that they\u2019ve mostly been concentrated on a few films: Robert Eggers\u2019 Nosferatu<\/a><\/em> (a Christmas release that played well into January), Danny Boyle\u2019s 28 Years Later<\/a><\/em>, and especially Ryan Coogler\u2019s Sinners<\/a><\/em>. They\u2019re about to be joined by Weapons<\/em>, writer-director Zach Cregger\u2019s follow-up to 2022\u2019s surprise hit Barbarian<\/a><\/em>, and of course Jordan Peele has already become one of the biggest directors around. Welcome to the auteur-horror era.<\/p>\n Obviously good old-fashioned brand-name horror can still hit it big. Fun as it is, Final Destination Bloodlines<\/a><\/em> does not exactly herald the arrival of a bold new voice in the genre, and it\u2019s one of the year\u2019s biggest movies. But it\u2019s only made half as much as Sinners<\/em>. And it\u2019s wild to realize that Cregger is poised to make a mint for the same horror-centric Warner Bros. shingle now that New Line has released Weapons<\/a> <\/em>this week.<\/p>\n To some extent, these directors simply function as tonier brand names than horror mainstays like Freddy, Jason, and Michael Myers. (It\u2019s probably not a coincidence that two of those three have long been absent from the big screen thanks to rights snarls.) But the Christopher Nolanificatin of horror still feels like a big deal. Cregger, in particular, is a case of a filmmaker who has solo-directed one previous movie and shot to brand-name status on its pure inventiveness and originality. By the time Robert Eggers was making it a goth Christmas with Nosferatu<\/em>, his old-timey deal was well-established by three arthouse-genre hybrids. Part of the thrill of waiting for Weapons<\/em> has been the mystery over what, exactly, Cregger\u2019s deal as a horror auteur is going to be.<\/p>\n