Get Out’s $100 Million Success Destroys a Hollywood Myth
By Yohana Desta. Photos: Courtesy of Universal Studios.
Jordan Peele isn’t done winning. Over the weekend, the Key and Peele alum’s directorial debut, Get Out, officially crossed the $100 million mark, bringing its total domestic total to $111 million—a whopping sum compared to the film’s extremely modest $4.5 million budget. It’s an especially impressive feat for a first time director who cast relative unknown Daniel Kaluuya (Black Mirror) in a leading role. All those Hollywood excuses claiming that black actors can‘t carry a film to crossover box office success? They’re in the Sunken Place now.
Get Out, which Peele also wrote, is about a black man who discovers a horrifying family secret while visiting his white girlfriend’s parents for the first time. It’s a brilliant and layered meditation on both modern and historical racism, and an especially vital piece of filmmaking in this politically charged era. Peele also filled it the film with Easter eggs and references to classic horror films, inspiring fans to see the movie more than once in theaters in order to catch things they might have missed the first time.
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Get Out’s success also makes it the fastest Blumhouse title to cross the $100 million mark, according to Deadline. The horror distributor previously fostered the Paranormal Activity franchise and recently released M. Night Shyamalan’s surprise blockbuster Split. “Most genre films drop in the second weekend by at least 60 percent,” Deadline notes—but Get Out has only suffered slight dips at the box office, indicating that it has some serious staying power.
The success bodes well for Peele’s ambitions to write and direct an entire series of social thrillers. In a recent interview with IndieWire, Peele said he has more films with similar themes in store.
“The best and scariest monsters in the world are human beings and what we are capable of especially when we get together,” he said. “I’ve been working on these premises about these different social demons, these innately human monsters that are woven into the fabric of how we think and how we interact, and each one of my movies is going to be about a different one of these social demons.”
This story originally appeared on Vanity Fair.
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