Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is bringing its curse-breaking skills to bear.

Blumhouse’s The Mummy reboot, which debuted in theaters on April 17, is their third reimagining of an iconic Universal Monsters movie (though the Warner Bros. Pictures release is the first of the three made without the direct involvement of Universal) after 2020’s The Invisible Man and 2025’s Wolf Man, both of which were written (or co-written) and directed by Leigh Whannell. While The Invisible Man was a hit, grossing $144.5 million against a reported $7 million budget, Wolf Man was a major disappointment, grossing $35.2 million against $25 million.

With a reported $22 million budget and a $13.5 million opening weekend that just barely exceeded Wolf Man‘s $10.9 million, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy originally looked to be on a trajectory to capsize in the same way as the 2025 feature. However, per Deadline, the movie is projected to end its sophomore weekend with a 3-day domestic total of $5.5 million, with a week-on-week drop of just 59%. This shows strong audience retention for a horror title, as the genre tends to be frontloaded, with sophomore drops of 60% or more.

In addition to vastly outperforming Wolf Man‘s devastating sophomore drop of 70.2% (while still falling behind The Invisible Man‘s 46.3%), the new Mummy movie has broken a curse that has recently befallen the horror genre. Although there have been several major horror hits in 2026 (including Scream 7, which is the sixth highest-grossing movie of the year worldwide at the time of writing), the year has been marked by especially devastating sophomore drops for horror movies.

In fact, six 2026 horror movies have already landed on the chart of the 200 biggest week 2 drops of all time, namely We Bury the Dead (No. 11 with 85.7%), Faces of Death (No. 25 with 82%), Psycho Killer (No. 38 with 80.6%), Scream 7 (No. 131 with 73.3%), 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (No. 142 with 72.6%), and The Bride! (No. 193 with 70.4%).

While not every 2026 horror movie has landed on that chart, a number of other releases have been hit with similarly extreme drops, including Return to Silent Hill (69.8%) and A24’s Undertone (66.8%).

It remains to be seen if this is an indication of better things to come for the horror genre in 2026. However, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy reviews have been quite negative, earning it a 46% score on Rotten Tomatoes that it has been able to overcome in order to score this solid sophomore weekend. This indicates that buzzier or better-reviewed titles hitting theaters in the next few months could potentially perform even better.

The roster of upcoming titles that could have similarly strong sophomore weekends include the parody franchise reboot Scary Movie, the Sam Raimi-produced Evil Dead Burn, the Blumhouse sequel Insidious: Out of the Further, Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil movie, and the anticipated original horror movies Hokum (97% on Rotten Tomatoes) and Obsession (96%).

Regardless of whether Lee Cronin’s The Mummy kicks off a new 2026 trend, the movie has cemented itself as a more viable commercial prospect than The Wolf Man. The movie is set to pass the $50 million milestone worldwide this weekend, pushing it nearly all the way to its estimated break-even point of $55 million and putting it on track to earn a solid profit by the end of its run.

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