Us shatters records with $70.3M
JORDAN PEELE HAS done it again. Two years after the filmmaker’s
Get Out became a box-office sensation, his frightening follow-up, Us, debuted with $70.3 million in ticket sales, according to studio estimates Sunday.
The opening, well above forecasts, had few parallels. It was the largest debut for an original horror film (only the It remake and last year’s Halloween have surpassed it in the genre) and one of the highest openings for a live-action original film since Avatar was released 10 years ago.
In today’s franchise-driven movie world, seldom has a young director been such a draw. But moviegoers turned out in droves to see what kind of freak-out Peele could muster in his sophomore release. “Peele has really crafted an extraordinary story that I think once again is going to capture the cultural zeitgeist,” said Jim Orr, distribution chief for Universal. “He is recognised as just an amazing talent. He crafts films that make you think, that are extraordinarily well-acted, well-written and are amazingly entertaining.”
Us took over the top spot at the box office from Captain Marvel, which had reigned for two weeks.
She’d chosen to affect a strained vocal condition - spasmodic dysphonia - to make Red even more haunting. And she had to do Red’s first big monologue 11 times with that raspy, painful sounding voice.
‘It’s a horror movie’
Us is chock full of pop culture references, subtle and overt: A Jaws t-shirt here, a C.H.U.D. VHS there. And every reference works “on two different levels and hopefully more,” Peele said. But don’t stress if you don’t catch or decipher them all. “There are many of these things that only I will ever know,” Peele revealed. Although one thing is not really up for interpretation: The genre. He tweeted the other day that “Us is a horror movie.”
“I have a little bit of fun with the big
genre conversation,” he said. “But I saw enough little pieces of like ‘horrorthriller,’ ‘horror-comedy,’ ‘socialthriller,’ out there that I just want to make it nice clean and defined: It’s a horror movie.”
Peele hasn’t tired of explaining that Us isn’t about race, either. Though he understands why people might think it would be, considering Get Out. “I know the way we are, the lack of representation in the industry and genre has led us to this point where it’s almost impossible to not see race in a movie with a black family in the center. And I wanted people to be ready to expand their expectations,” Peele said. “My fear was if I didn’t say anything that people would take away that this was a movie about black-on-black violence which was not my intention.”