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I don’t know what to think of this being one the most successful horror franchise in history.
Alien beats Conjuring based on inflation adjusted values. Alien’s 1979 box office of $188 M is equivalent to $839 M in 2025 and Aliens’ nominal box office goes from $183 M nominal to $541 M in 2025 dollars.
But looking at how fast they’re pushing out the Conjuring movies (and how successful they are), I wouldn’t be surprised if Conjuring beats out the Alien franchise in another 2-3 years.
On a per movie basis, Conjuring’s top performing movie (#5 rank) drops a lot when adjusting for inflation.
But the real leader is The Exorcist (1973) which goes from rank #9 to #1, with nominal $431 M box office resulting in $3,145 M in 2025 dollars.
The same calculation for Jaws (1975) transforms nominal box office of $495 M to $2,980 M in 2025 dollars. With rank going from #5 to #2.
The Jaws franchise would also beat Conjuring if we use 2025 dollars as a baseline.
It’s pretty concerning. The Warrens were monster people who made a living on exploiting as many people as they could and hated each other the entire goddamn time. Rights to their stories requires that they are portrayed as a kind, loving couple. I’ve only seen the first 2.5 of these movies and was appalled by the blatant Christian propaganda; they play on the same performativity that the Warrens did and apparently that scam still works. Except, these movies are reaching more people than the Warrens did and unfortunately validate a lot of harmful ideas within.
Also, like, production wise, they’re just cheap and uninspired without any original quality. They’re just loud, mean, and consumable movies. A good example of why we shouldn’t use the capital produced by movies to judge what is successful or not.
For sure, these are just musings on my part.
I watched two or three of the Conjuring movies before and I wouldn’t really consider them to be much better than most low budget horror.
