The Conjuring Box Office, Warner Bros, and the Value of a Diverse Slate

As you probably heard, Warner Bros. Pictures is having a pretty good fall, which comes on the heels of a very good summer and a terrific spring. That’s because the studio’s fourth and supposedly final mainline Conjuring picture, The Conjuring: Last Rites, proved that there is still life in the demonic thing, even as trades inexplicably continue to claim horror fatigue is a threat.

There is irony in this since The Conjuring 4 opened at a reported $83 million over its first three days, more than doubling the $41 million take of the 2013 original and the $40 million take of the first sequel in 2016. (The third film, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, is the only underperformer but that opened to $24 million during the post-COVID recovery summer in 2021 and simultaneously with an HBO Max premiere.) In other words, it seems the franchise has only grown more popular, and its newfound success in 2025 corresponds with some of WB’s biggest successes this year, including horror movies like Sinners, Weapons, and Final Destination: Bloodlines. All of those films also contribute to WB’s newest hat trick: it is the first studio to have seven consecutive movies open north of $40 million. 

The three other, non-horror successes are A Minecraft Movie ($162 million), Superman ($125 million), and F1 ($57 million).

Yes, that is a nice story for the studio to crow about, and some much needed good publicity for Warner Bros. Discovery after anonymous parties floated to the press that WBD CEO David Zaslav was meeting with “candidates” to replace studio heads Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy last March. This was evidently a result of Mickey 17 and Joker 2 flopping in the six months prior to the gossip. It also proved a bit premature since at least the beginnings of both financial failures’ development predated De Luca and Abdy’s tenure. On the other side of Sinners, Weapons, and F1’s success, this PR-temperature check looks deathly ironic—although perhaps apt for the same guy who shelved near-finished movies for tax write-offs and is one of the driving forces behind adapting Harry Potter again, but you know, this time make it TV.

Still, the success of the 2025 WB slate has bigger tea leaf importance than just bragging rights in the ruthless game of thrones of studio politics. The validation also points toward a future in the mid-2020s and beyond where a healthy studio portfolio is neither the play-it-safe formula Disney perfected to the rest of the town’s envy in the 2010s, nor the second coming of 1970s New Hollywood that so much of Film Twitter, and plenty of cinephiles like myself, might yearn for.

Instead the success of WB’s 2025 slate would seem to suggest a balanced portfolio, not that conceptually different from where the studios were back in the 2000s, is the best managed risk you can now have. Theirs is a slate of medium-sized risks (or with a single big one, depending how you look at Sinners’ $90 million budget), plus a backstop of reliable intellectual property safe bets.

It’s no secret that WB’s entire fiscal year and beyond was centered on Superman’s launch. James Gunn’s kickoff to the new sparkly DCU enjoyed a mid-July release date, roughly the same weekend real estate WB has historically used to corner pop culture with events like Barbie, The Dark Knight, Inception, and the final Harry Potter film, Deathly Hallows – Part 2 in 2011 (which is less than 15 years ago, by the by). While Superman didn’t quite reach the adjusted for inflation heights of those films, it was a robust and successful relaunch of a brand that was petering out when The Flash opened to just $55 million two years ago. 

It should also be stated that Superman was another major priority for Zaslav, and one he appears pleased with since the sequel Man of Tomorrow was publicly fast-tracked last week to 2027, with the Supergirl spinoff tiding fans over in the intermediate summer. Yet while Superman is the studio’s big IP success story—with it being based on one of the most recognizable comic book brands in the world—one might argue WB’s biggest success of the year was Sinners.

The auteur-first film from Ryan Coogler is an original, R-rated, dramatic horror movie aimed squarely at adults. It deals with thorny issues of racism in the segregated Jim Crow South, as well as vampires… and it opened to $48 million ahead of a worldwide take of $367 million. Based off its reported $90 million budget, the movie more than quadrupled its production costs at the global box office (while not accounting for marketing and publicity costs). That’s a roaring success for De Luca and Abdy who greenlit the movie, but also for original cinema as well.

Admittedly these movies do not release in a vacuum, and it should be acknowledged that Sinners had the advantage of being directed by a filmmaker who became a marquee draw for moviegoers apparently before trade reporters noticed. Coogler has long developed a fanbase after doing IP movies like Creed and both Black Panther pictures. Sinners also likely benefited from being an IMAX release, which is increasingly a draw unto itself, and finally by being a horror movie. Despite the odd insistence by some that “horror fatigue” is one day going to fall out of the sky, the quantifiable truth is it remains the only genre where folks seem to enjoy showing up en masse for original stories on a regular basis.

That can apply to Weapons’ status as a sleeper hit, but still also inform more-IP and nostalgia reliant successes like Conjuring 4 and Final Destination 6. However, the WB slate also includes one other wholly original movie in the lineup, and it’s another crowdpleaser aimed at adults: the Brad Pitt-starring F1.

Intriguingly F1 is also not a WB production. While the Bugs Bunny studio distributed the Formula 1 racing drama, it was produced and financed by Apple Studios, which sank at least $200 million into a movie about the old guy having “one more” race in him to prove he’s still got it. (Did we mention the film was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and directed by Top Gun: Maverick’s Joseph Kosinski?). It was a deliberate throwback to ‘80s and ‘90s high-concept flicks, and one that folks who remember those glory days came out to support.

Before premiering on Apple TV+, F1 grossed a reported $619 million at the global box office. How much of that is a theatrical success might depend on whether F1 cost its reported $200 million budget or closer to a rumored $300 million. But either way, it is a bonafide win for Apple, which produced one of the biggest movies of the summer, and a film that outgrossed all three Marvel Studios releases for the year. That acts as a major advertising banner for their streaming service.

Its success also gets to the point I want to make. While four of the seven movies that led WB to its Monday morning victory lap are based on brands and IPs, three of them are not. And of the three original films, two are relatively modestly priced horror movies ($90 million in 2025 when adjusted for inflation would have been a moderate $54 million in 2005); and one is an adult-skewing drama. And even then, WB and Apple found an innovative strategy to mitigate F1’s risk by giving the film the marketing push of a true summer blockbuster, but also couching that into a glorified streaming service’s advertising budget.

The result is a string of successes that suggest moviegoers still prefer brands and formulas they recognize, but which is tiring of only receiving the same franchises that dominated multiplexes in the 2010s or earlier. And frankly, the success of original horror and “dad movie” action-drama spectacles makes me wonder how hungry the audience is for a well-made and marketed studio comedy. We already saw folks, including Generation Z, turn up in droves for a mediocre one via Anyone But You during the holiday season of 2023.

WB diversifying its slate beyond the safest bets and IPs gave them a leg up, something the town would seem to be noticing. After all, only a few weeks ago, it leaked that Disney is desperate to create “original IP” after seeing Marvel’s popularity with Gen-Z boys continue to slide. Whether deals and partnerships need to be made with streaming services or otherwise, we suspect film slates that look more like 20 years ago than five might do the industry—not to mention the audience—a world of good. Original, high-concept crowdpleasers and mid-budget genre plays. Who’d have guessed?

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