It wouldn’t be unfair to say that Disney is on one of its worst-ever runs at the box office, with Haunted Mansion just one of many catastrophic flops to have arrived over the course of the last two years.
Once the single most bulletproof hit factory in the entire industry, the Mouse House has been forced to sit by and watch as the likes of Strange World, Lightyear, Jungle Cruise, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, and the aforementioned reboot racked up cumulative losses that tickled a billion dollars.
Releasing a spooky spectacular with a star-studded cast and a $157 million price tag at the height of summer when its ensemble was on strike and unable to promote it was a kiss of death from the beginning that everybody could have seen coming, but at least Justin Simien’s reboot of the 2003 Eddie Murphy vehicle has managed to cross $100 million globally at long last.
Not only that, but hell is still capable of freezing over during the warmest months of the year after Haunted Mansion only went and topped the charts during its opening weekend in Japan, even if a modest $3.2 million is hardly going to be enough to drag it out of the red. When the dust settles, the supernatural family comedy is on course to be one of Disney’s biggest ever bombs, but at least it managed to reach number one somewhere before it gets consigned to the history books forevermore.