Terrifier 3 Gives The Wild Robot an Assist

Sometimes the best marketing move is simply understanding opportunity — like when Girl Scouts sell cookies outside dispensaries. The Wild Robot may have benefitted from some auspicious timing that should become a major animated-movie-release strategy moving forward. The Hollywood Reporter cites speculation among industry insiders that the animated film’s uptick in ticket sales last week could be due to teenagers buying tickets, then sneaking into Terrifier 3. Hey, a buck is a buck is a buck.

The clown horror opted to go unrated by the Classification and Rating Administration — which means that the theaters technically don’t need to turn anyone away at the door. But the largest theater chains, like AMC, Regal, and Cinemark, are treating it like an R-rated film and turning the youth away anyway. To be fair, it would probably be NC-17. The first film in the franchise includes a woman being strung upside down, naked, and being sawed in half.

No matter the reasoning, both films did well at the box office, beating out Joker 2 in third place. The Wild Robot ended up in second place, bringing its domestic-box-office total up to $89 million after three weeks, while Terrifier 3 won the weekend with a $21.5 million opening. If you’d told us a year ago that a movie about a killer clown was the No. 1 movie in the country this week, Terrifier 3 would not have been our bet. But Art the Clown beat out Arthur the clown, proving the people prefer screaming to singing.