The Strangers: Chapter 2 Box Office Raises Big Questions About The Fate Of Chapter 3

Horror has been red hot for much of 2025. From "Sinners" to "Weapons," some of the year's biggest original hits have come from the genre. Elsewhere, long-awaited sequels like "28 Years Later" and "Final Destination Bloodlines" have also crushed it at the box office. But they can't all be winners, and not all horror franchises are created equal. As such, we must discuss the very disappointing result for Lionsgate's "The Strangers: Chapter 2," which leaves some questions in its wake, particularly since a third chapter is already in the can.

Director Renny Harlin's "The Strangers: Chapter 2" opened to $5.8 million domestically this past weekend. That was at the very low end of pre-release projections. Meanwhile, director Paul Thomas Anderson's "One Battle After Another" topped the charts with $22 million. Still, that certainly wasn't playing for the same audience, and it wasn't a particularly big opening. Ultimately, nothing should have stood in this movie's way. Audiences, on the whole, decided to pass or, at the very least, are taking the "I'll just watch it at home" approach.

2024's "The Strangers: Chapter 1" was merely a modest hit for Lionsgate, opening to just $12 million en route to an eventual $48 million worldwide. That was good enough, given that Lionsgate paid roughly $8.5 million a movie for the planned trilogy, filming them all at once. However, the studio also did fairly significant reshoots after the response to the first entry, which /Film's BJ Colangelo called a "paint-by-numbers slasher" in her review.

Harlin's trilogy isn't just a remake of Bryan Bertino's 2008 home invasion horror classic, but an expansion of the mythology around these masked slashers. Unfortunately, it's not resonating with audiences in the way Lionsgate had hoped. Now, the studio has a third movie it has to do something with, even as the law of diminishing returns continues kicking in hard.

"The Strangers: Chapter 2" picks up as the infamous, mysterious masked killers learn that Maya (Madelaine Petsch) is still alive. They then seek to finish what they started, leaving Maya to survive another horrific bout with these murderers (who seem driven by an unshakable purpose to pursue her).

"Chapter 2" grossed less than half of what its predecessor made on opening weekend, and "Chapter 1" earned 73% of its money in North America. Hence, overseas audiences aren't likely going to bail it out at the box office, and its prospects are not great. Working in Lionsgate's favor is the fact that the investment for Harlin's ambitious "Strangers" trilogy was still relatively low. Even accounting for whatever was spent on the reshoots, the sequel should still at least manage to break even once VOD/streaming is factored in.

But the sequel has not, on the whole, been viewed as an improvement over its predecessor. In his review of "The Strangers: Chapter 2," /Film's Rafael Motamayor called it "an uninspiring survival horror with repetitive set pieces, baffling character choices, and a mythology that feels like it's erasing the very reason this franchise exists in the first place." That means, more than likely, Lionsgate is going to suffer from even more diminished returns when "Chapter 3" arrives, whenever that may be.

Originally, it seemed like the plan was to release the movies much closer together. The response to "Chapter 1" changed all of that. Now, Lionsgate must weigh what to do with a film that has very minimal commercial prospects. Dump it to VOD? Sell it to a streaming service? Just release it in theaters next year and hope for the best? We shall see. Either way, this grand experiment can now pretty firmly be called a disappointment. It was a big swing that just didn't connect in the way all involved had hoped.

"The Strangers: Chapter 2" is in theaters now.