Jordan Peele’s Us shattered expectations, after bringing in an estimated $70.2 million and topping the domestic box office, according to Comscore.
The release from Universal and Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions scored the best opening ever for
an original horror film, as well as the highest-grossing debut for an original R-rated film, according to Universal.
“Jordan Peele has again captured the imagination of the domestic box office with the spectacular debut of ‘Us,’ significantly exceeding the most robust forecasts,” Jim Orr, Universal’s president of Domestic Distribution said in a statement Sunday morning.
The film performed particularly well at theaters in New York, Washington DC, Atlanta and Baltimore, the studio said. The horror flick was also a hit with movie critics, scoring a 94 percent rating on review aggregation site, Rotten Tomatoes.
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The follow-up to Peele’s Oscar-winning directorial debut, Get Out, stars Lupita Nyong’o and Winston Duke as parents who take their children on a terrifying family vacation to a beach house in Northern California.
Us more than doubled the opening haul of Get Out, which debuted with $33.3 million in February 2017.
Elsewhere at the box office, last week’s leader, Captain Marvel, slipped to second place with $35 million, bringing the Disney-Marvel release’s three-week domestic haul to a jaw-dropping $321.5 million.
Paramount’s Wonder Park took third place with $9.0 million.
Lionsgate’s Five Feet Apart came in fourth with $8.7 million, and Universal’s How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World rounded out the top five with $6.5 million.
