A' Hot Mess': Disney Sees Another Box Office Flop, Likely To Lose Millions As Opening Weekend Disappoints

The Walt Disney Company’s latest multi-million dollar movie is following the stream of disappointment set by earlier films, with ‘Haunted Mansion’ pulling in a disappointing $24 million domestically on its opening weekend, per BoxOfficeMojo.

The media giant hasn’t had much luck when it comes to movies lately, with movies like ‘Lightyear’ and ‘Elemental’ pulling in disappointing sales numbers. Their latest, ‘Haunted Mansion,’ is seeming to continue with that. The movie is estimated to have a massive $158 million budget per The Numbers, making the opening weekend sting all the more.

According to IMDb, the plot of the film is “A single mom named Gabbie hires a tour guide, a psychic, a priest and a historian to help exorcize her newly bought mansion after discovering it is inhabited by ghosts.” The movie touts big names such as Danny Devito and Owen Wilson, though it doesn’t seem as though it’ll be enough to save the film. 

The box office is currently being dominated by the likes of ‘Barbie’ and ‘Oppenheimer,’ who, over the same weekend, managed to pull in $93 million and $46.2 million, respectively. When your movie is getting absolutely dominated on its opening weekend by films that have already been out for a week, things aren’t looking good long term. 

The film also isn’t receiving the most stellar reviews so far, with the aforementioned IMDb user rating currently sitting at a measly 6.3. Things aren’t much better on Rotten Tomatoes where the critic score is an abysmal 41 percent at the time of publication. 

Published reviewers also aren’t giving it very high praise, with Variety’s Peter Debruge writing, “The more this overlong movie relies on ghosts, the less engaging it becomes, and though Simien presents a few optical illusions — such as endless hallways and a stretching room modeled after the ride’s trompe l’oeil antechamber — the ideas are more interesting than the execution.”

Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri wrote about how hard it was to make a children's horror movie, trying to give the movie all the credit that can be afforded to it, but still concluding that it was a “hot mess” that “falls prey to the same problem as a lot of VFX-driven horror movies.”

It seems that a company that once couldn’t produce a flop if it tried has now reached a point where it’s somehow become the norm. The movie doesn’t even seem to attempt to go the recent Disney route of attempting to shove a political agenda down its viewer's throat and instead just simply fails at being a worthwhile film in the first place.