Image / 20th Century Studios
Superbowl Sunday has been the calendar’s “white flag” for a while now but the 2026 frame shook things up and turned out to be a study in the art of not getting buried under the football hype. While the NFL was drowning out every other sound on TV, the box office turned into a battleground for original genre flicks to fight it out with hard-hitting – and polarising – political dramas. The result? A quiet but decisive win for Sam Raimi’s Send Help and a desperately needed reality check for the Melania biopic – which turned out to be a costly experiment that just didn’t pay off.
The Raimi Resurgence
Sam Raimi‘s new survival thriller Send Help had a pretty impressive fight to stay afloat, thanks to that horror pedigree it had going for it. On at 20 million on opening weekend, the 20th Century Studios release somehow managed to wring out another $10-11 million of that this week – taking the domestic total to $36 million.
This is a real return to form for Raimi, his best horror opener since Drag Me to Hell. It shows that in a market stuffed with sequels that a lean, mean survival pitch still has some real clout with our younger generation – Gen Z and Millennials – who couldn’t care less about being glued to a Super Bowl party and are more interested in something a little more thrilling.
The Melania Meltdown
If Send Help proved that the original genre can really carry weight, then the Melania biopic showed us that controversy can be a very short-lived money maker. Despite getting a pretty solid $7 million start, the Brett Ratner directed biopic tanked big time in its second week with a 67% drop off – raking in a whopping $2.4 million from 2,078 screens.
It looks like the “outrage economy” Amazon MGM was banking on may be a pretty short-lived phenomenon. The film saw some niche success in areas like Orlando and Houston, where the Republican crowd is a bit bigger but that wasn’t enough to save it. The movie got a dismal 10% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes and the $75 million it cost to buy the rights is starting to look like a pretty serious problem.
Weekend Box Office Estimates (Domestic)
| Rank | Title | Weekend (Est.) | Total Cume |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Send Help | $10.2M | $36.1M |
| 2 | Iron Lung | $6.2M | $23.3M |
| 3 | Melania | $2.4M | $10.1M |
| 4 | Zootopia 2 | $1.8M | $408.9M |
| 5 | Primate | $1.5M | $25.3M |
The Markiplier Effect
The real game changer of the month is still the independently made horror movie Iron Lung. Financing it was YouTube star Markiplier aka Mark Fischbach & he managed to make the whole thing for just $3 million. But have a look at those numbers – the thing has already raked in $23.3 million domestically. That’s more than some major studio projects like Chris Pratt’s Mercy – which has fundamentally changed the conversation around how creators are distributing their own work.
Now, theater owners are taking a liking to this “event-based” fandom and are actually extending Iron Lung’s run through the end of February to fill the gap between big movies. Theyre basically holding their breath to see where this thing goes
Valentine’s Vengeance
The industry is now looking to February 13th as the day they can break the Super Bowl slump. Warner Bros. is going all out to try and get a massive $45-60 million opening for Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights – with Margot Robbie in the lead. And with some other movies like India’s Saiyaara getting re-released & Funky – well, it looks like the mid-February window is going to be the first real pick-me-up of 2026.
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