There are many reasons why Haunted Mansion failed – not least of all the decision to spend over $150 million on a reboot of a movie that wasn’t all that popular to begin with – but one of the most notable is that releasing a spooky spectacular in the middle of summer was a stupid idea.
That’s not to say Disney would have avoided yet another catastrophic bomb had it held back until October, but you’d at the very least think the tie-ins would have made the marketing campaign a lot easier. Clearly ignoring the recent failure of a major theatrical release, though, Netflix is dropping new horror Killer Book Club on the 25th of this month.
The Spanish-language chiller finds a group of students meeting every week to discuss their love for terrifying literature, only to become embroiled in a fatal accident that forces them to swear a vow of silence. Naturally, their secret is threatened to be revealed by an assailant who also publishes a tale based on their misdeeds, with one of them dying a brutal death every time a new chapter goes live.
It sounds solid, although you may be wondering what Killer Book Club has to do with Haunted Mansion when they couldn’t be more different, and one of them won’t even be playing in theaters. The answer is that Netflix has bungled more than a few release dates recently, with They Cloned Tyrone debuting on the same day as Barbenheimer a major driving force behind one of the streamer’s best-reviewed originals ever bombing among viewers.
Will people be willing to check out a bloodthirsty slasher amidst sweltering heat? We’ll find out soon enough, with little over a week to go until Killer Book Club arrives.