With Easter weekend less than a month away, Sony announced today that will be opening the Evan Spiliotopoulos’ Screen Gems supernatural PG-13 horror movie The Unholy on April 2.
The feature based on the James Herbert novel Shrine joins Warner Bros/Legandary’s theatrical release of Godzilla vs. Kong which is opening on Wednesday, March 31 (and also hitting HBO Max simultaneously) as the big wide releases for the holiday weekend. That period has traditionally been a robust time at the B.O. given how the frame coincides with spring break. During great pre-pandemic box office times, Warner Bros’ Batman v. Superman is the record B.O. opener for Easter weekend with $181M domestic, while Universal’s Furious 7 is second with $161.2M. There’s great hope in the industry that Los Angeles might have the go-ahead to reopen cinemas by Easter weekend. This past weekend, New York City reopened its cinemas propelling the DMA to be the No. 1 B.O. market in the country with $1M per sources.
The Unholy follows Alice, a young hearing-impaired girl who, after a supposed visitation from the Virgin Mary, is inexplicably able to hear, speak and heal the sick. As word spreads and people from near and far flock to witness her miracles, a disgraced journalist (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) hoping to revive his career visits the small New England town to investigate. When terrifying events begin to happen all around, he starts to question if these phenomena are the works of the Virgin Mary or something much more sinister. The Unholy is produced by Sam Raimi, Rob Tapert and Spiliotopoulos, the latter who also wrote and directed the feature. EPs are Andrea Ajemian and Romel Adam. Katie Aselton, William Sadler, Cricket Brown, with Diogo Morgado and Cary Elwes also star.