Summary
- Insidious: The Red Door surpasses M3GAN to become the biggest horror hit of the year.
- The Insidious franchise has earned over $735 million worldwide, making it the most successful supernatural horror franchise.
- Insidious: The Red Door is a satisfying conclusion to the main Lambert trilogy, though it received mixed reviews from critics.
Last month’s long-awaited sequel, Insidious: The Red Door, has become the biggest horror hit of the year so far, beating the likes of M3GAN, Scream VI, and Evil Dead Rise. According to a report by Deadline, the Insidious follow-up has now grossed $182.5 million at the worldwide box office, topping M3GAN’s equally impressive $180.8 million.
This year has been a solid one for horror, with the likes of Scream VI earning $169 million, Evil Dead Rise bringing in $146.7 million, and The Pope's Exorcist starring Russel Crowe earning $76 million. The impressive box office taking now achieved by Insidious: The Red Door also makes the fifth installment the most successful in the supernatural horror franchise, which in total has earned over $735 million worldwide.
Released back in July, Insidious: The Red Door is set ten years after the end of previous first two movies, 2010's Insidious and 2013's Insidious: Chapter 2, and finds Josh Lambert heading east to drop his son Dalton off at an idyllic, ivy-covered university. However, Dalton’s college dream soon becomes a nightmare when the repressed demons of his past suddenly return to haunt them both.
The fifth outing in the hugely successful Insidious franchise reunites the likes of Patrick Wilson as Josh Lambert, Rose Byrne as Renai Lambert, Ty Simpkins as Dalton Lambert, and Andrew Astor as Foster Lambert as this put upon and endlessly haunted family once again find themselves facing down all manner of demons and ghouls from The Further. The rest of the cast includes Peter Dager, Jarquez McClendon, Sinclair Daniel, and Hiam Abbass and sees Patrick Wilson make his directorial debut and working from a script written by Scott Teems.
Insidious: The Red Door Was Met With Mixed Reviews From Critics
While Insidious: The Red Door saw huge success at the box office, the horror sequel was met with mixed reviews from critics upon release. Now at 39% on the review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, someone who found much to enjoy in Insidious: The Red Door was MovieWeb’s own Richard Fink, who found the follow-up to be a satisfying possible conclusion to the franchise.
“Insidious: The Red Door not only puts the franchise back on track, but it serves as an effective conclusion to the main Lambert trilogy of films while also tying nicely into the two prequel films to make a solid horror saga. It brings a story that started in 2011 to a satisfying conclusion. It might not be as scary as the original, but it gets pretty close.”
Though Insidious: The Red Door may be the final outing in the main series, it is far from the end for the Insidious franchise, as a spinoff is already in development. Titled Thread: An Insidious Tale, creator and producer James Wan has teased what audiences can expect from the project. “Yeah, Thread basically kind of takes off from the world of The Further in the same way that when I look at my Conjuring films, I go, "Hey, the Warrens have a haunted museum, there's so many different haunted artifacts that we can kind of spin off stories from," and Thread really is something in that same spirit,” the filmmaker said last month.