In the buildup to its release, the overriding belief among virtually everybody was that Disney’s Haunted Mansion reboot was preordained to tank at the box office, which is about the only front on which it managed to live up to expectations.
Deciding to reboot a 20 year-old theme park adaptation that wasn’t even that good or successful to begin with was one of just many questionable decisions made along the way, with the call to have a spooky spectacular release at the height of summer at a ridiculous cost of $157 million another pair of the most notable questions.
In the end, Justin Simien’s supernatural do-over did exactly what was expected of it and flopped horrendously, only managing to cobble together $114 million in ticket sales. For the record, that’s almost $70 million less than the Eddie Murphy original that cost nearly $70 million less to produce, but that wasn’t even the worst of it.
Haunted Mansion also conspired to become the worst-performing entry an entire genre had seen in over 20 years, with a domestic total of $47 million coupled with its dismal global tally making it the lowest-earning live-action adaptation of a Disney theme park attraction since 2002’s The Country Bears.
Ironically, the unmitigated commercial disaster has finally managed to capture an audience at long last, and it absolutely isn’t a coincidence that it’s coincided with its streaming debut coming in the run-up to Halloween. Per FlixPatrol, Haunted Mansion has arrived on Disney Plus as its seventh most-watched feature, but even at that, it’s nowhere near reaching the very summit, which says it all.