Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu is already the highest-grossing film of his career, and has just broken plenty more records besides. More below…
Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu claimed the top spot at the UK box office this week, beating out Mufasa: The Lion King and Sonic The Hedgehog 3 with £5,246,910 across its five-day opening weekend. In an even more family-unfriendly move, we’re pretty confidently saying that makes it the first UK number one to feature a full-frontal shot of an undead penis. That’s an accolade Eggers and co can really be proud of.
But that’s not the only record broken by the historical auteur’s 19th-century passion project. According to Deadline, the film out-grossed Eggers’ The Northman's entire opening weekend after its first day on release, and gives Universal the biggest opening for a horror film in the UK since its own Five Nights At Freddy’s in 2023 (£5,379,587).
After opening in the US with a $40m Christmas weekend last year, Nosferatu currently sits pretty at just over $100m globally – a huge coup for a director previously praised more for his ability to make a compelling film than an awful lot of money. In our review of the silent-classic remake, we called it “properly, unambiguously scary… genuinely unnerving in a way gothic horror hasn’t been in years” and piled a bunch more compliments on top for good measure.
It’s a surprising week all-round at the box office, too. John Crowley’s We Live In Time, after releasing in the US last October, has seen Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh’s homegrown charm catapult the romantic weepy to third place with £2,843,516, ahead of last week’s number one movie, Sonic The Hedgehog 3 (£2,672,308).
Read more: Will horror films finally break into the Oscars in 2025?
All in all, its an unusually positive-looking week after Comscore announced nine of the 10 highest-grossing movies of 2024 were sequels or part of existing franchises. While Nosferatu is technically a remake, the likes of F. W. Murnau and Werner Herzog’s previous films are hardly the sort of thing you’re likely to see plastered on a lunchbox. It’s also, unsurprisingly from Eggers, more than a little strange; vampire genitalia aside, explorations of female sexual repression and the erotic quality of a dead Transylvanian nobleman are hardly licenses to print money. And We Live In Time is entirely original (though it contains almost none of the above).
Instead, the UK’s 2025 box office story kicks off on a high, celebrating a studio (Focus Features in the US) sticking to its guns and promoting an unashamedly authorial passion project to become a genuine box office success. Will this mean more remakes of 20th-century silent cinema in the pipeline? We can only pray…
For more on Nosferatu, check out our chats with director Robert Eggers, stars Emma Corrin and Willem Dafoe and producer Chris Columbus. We liked the film a lot, if you couldn’t tell…
