Skip To...
Haunted Mansion, a big-budget film, faced tough competition and didn’t do well in theaters. The director, Justin Simien, was not happy about this. He saw problems with the movie’s release date and marketing. He felt they were overshadowed by the Barbenheimer phenomena. Despite the film’s poor performance at the box office, there’s hope it will do better on Disney+ and in future releases.
Haunted Mansion Director Upset Over Movie’s Struggles
Justin Simien, director of Haunted Mansion, talked about how his movie had a hard time because of Barbenheimer. He made the movie based on a famous Disney ride. It’s about a man named Ben who helps a family with ghost problems in their new house. But the movie didn’t make enough money. It cost more to make the movie than they earned back from people watching it.
Simien told TheWrap, that he was worried about how Barbie and Oppenheimer movies were also coming out. He thought they took all the attention away from his movie.
I saw ‘Barbie’ coming from miles away. I was disappointed by some aspects of our release, but I was not really surprised.
Justin Simien
Simien also talked about other problems that were not about the movie. He said these issues hurt the movie’s success. Simien was sad because he knows a lot about how movies are advertised to people. He felt if people had listened to him, he could have warned them about these problems.
Simien thought his movie’s advertisements should have talked about how big Barbenheimer was. He said:
What ‘Oppenheimer’ did so well — the marketing for ‘Oppenheimer’ embraced the fact that ‘Barbie’ was coming with this gigantic, cultural juggernaut. I don’t know that our campaign necessarily embraced or acknowledged that we were essentially coming out in the shadow of what was clearly such a box office phenomenon.
Justin Simien
Why the Movie Didn’t Make Enough Money
Haunted Mansion also had bad reviews. People didn’t say nice things about it, so not many people went to see it. The time the movie came out didn’t help either. It was in the summer, but the story is about a haunted house, which feels like a Halloween theme.
But, even with these problems, the big success of Barbenheimer made things harder for Haunted Mansion. If Haunted Mansion had used its advertisements to talk about this big competition, maybe more people would have gone to see it. But it’s hard to say if that would have helped enough.
The movie didn’t do well in theaters, so making a Haunted Mansion 2 seems unlikely. But, it’s now available on Disney+, and people can buy it to watch at home starting October 17. This gives the movie a chance to be liked by more people in a new way, even though it had a rough start.
