There are many reasons why Disney’s Haunted Mansion failed so embarrassingly at the box office this summer, but one of the primary culprits behind its demise was the studio’s decision to not just release a family-friendly supernatural blockbuster at the height of summer, but right after Barbenheimer.
Greta Gerwig and Christopher Nolan cornered the market for weeks on end, hoovering up a cumulative total well north of $2 billion in the process, leaving director Justin Simien’s theme park adaptation to crash and burn. Would Haunted Mansion have fared better had it held off until around Halloween? We’ll never know, but it’s beginning to look that way.
Having finally captured an audience on Disney Plus after premiering at the beginning of October, the money-losing failure has debuted as the number one most-watched movie on all of streaming following its arrival on the Nielsen streaming charts, notching 992 million minutes, a long way ahead of Netflix’s half-baked crime thriller Reptile, which came in second with 838 million minutes.
Simien admitted himself that a late-July release date did the movie absolutely no favors whatsoever, and having come nowhere close to recouping its ridiculous $157 million in theaters, the fact Haunted Mansion has certified itself as a top-tier success story on streaming twice over since landing in – you guessed it – the buildup to the spookiest day on the calendar indicates that one catastrophic call from the Mouse House may have cut if off at the knees from the very start.
It’s far too late for salvation now, but at least people are getting around to watching at long last.