Most watched Halloween film since 2021 made box office loss despite all-star cast
If you thought film lovers were sticking on classics like Halloween, The Conjuring and Nightmare on Elm Street this Halloween, you’re dead wrong.
Nielsen, the company best known for tracking TV and streaming viewership in the US, has crunched the numbers to find out what movies people actually watched in October over the last five years.
First off, fewer Americans are watching horror movies over Halloween than you might think. It made up just 14.7 percent of the minutes people viewed movies in October 2025.
And if we look at the movie that’s been watched for the most amount of minutes from 2021 to 2025, you’ll probably be surprised to hear that it’s Haunted Mansion.
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No, not the 2003 version starring Eddie Murphy. The 2023 reboot. It was viewed for a whopping 3,500,000,000 minutes over the last three years, according to Nielsen.
If, like me, you didn’t realise there even was a reboot, that might be because it came out on 28 July 2023.
That’s the weekend after Barbie and Oppenheimer both dropped on 21 July, and pretty much everyone went to see those films instead - ideally back-to-back with themed outfits - with warnings over watching Christopher Nolan's epic before Greta Gerwig's seminal classic.
This spelled disaster for Disney’s Haunted Mansion, with a worldwide box office of $117 million against a reported $150 million budget.
Critics were also cold on it - with just a 38 percent critics score on Rotten Tomatoes, which is at least an improvement on the 2003 version’s abysmal 14 percent score.
Filmgoers thought differently, giving it an 84 percent audience score, which explains why it’s been watched so widely over Halloween.
It stars LaKeith Stanfield, Tiffany Haddish, Owen Wilson, Danny DeVito, Rosario Dawson, Dan Levy, Jamie Lee Curtis and Jared Leto in a convoluted story about astrophysicists, ghosts trapped in crystal balls, and suspicious exorcists.
Reviews describe it as ‘underrated’ and ‘not as bad as you think it would be’, while some even went as far to describe it as 'laugh out loud funny'.
If you want to see why so many people are putting it on for Halloween, it's currently streaming on Disney+.
The second most-watched movie of the last five Halloweens is 2022's Halloween Ends at 1,321,000,000 minutes, reviled by many critics for barely featuring the iconic boogeyman Michael Myers.
As for the rest of Nielsen’s list, it’s a mix of true Halloween classics and more modern fare.
There’s a distinct bias towards child and tween-friendly content, which is perhaps unsurprising given one in five Americans are under 18 and many more have to consider a small person when choosing what to stick on the telly.
The top ten most-watched Halloween movies 2021-2026
- Haunted Mansion (2023) - 3,500,000,000 minutes - watch on Disney+
- Halloween Ends (2022) - 1,321,000,000 minutes
- The Curse of Bridge Hollow (2022) - 1,286,000,000 minutes - watch on Netflix
- Halloween (1978) - 1,082,000,000 minutes - watch on BBC iPlayer
- Mr. Harrigan's Phone (2022) - 998,000,000 minutes - watch on Netflix
- Five Nights at Freddy's (2023) - 956,000,000 minutes
- Scream (1996) - 950,000,000 minutes - watch on Prime Video
- Hubie Halloween (2020) - 811,000,000 minutes - watch on Netflix
- Don’t Move (2024) - 810,000,000 minutes - watch on Netflix
- Meg 2: The Trench (2023) - 752,000,000 minutes - watch on NOW or HBO Max
Elsewhere, Nielsen found that Millennials are the biggest gorehounds, making up 31 percent of the horror movie minutes watched so far this year, compared to 27 percent for Gen X, 20 percent for Gen Z, 14 percent for Boomers, and seven percent for Gen Alpha.
As for what the different generations are watching - I may be biased as a 1996 baby, but Millennials undoubtedly have the best taste with 28 Days Later sequel The Bone Temple and Obsession being their favourite movies.
Gen Z was all about Ethan Hawke supernatural serial killer movie The Black Phone, Gen X opted for bloody carnage with Primate and World War Z, while Boomers kept it classy with Michael B. Jordan’s Oscar-winner Sinners.
So, there you have it. I’m off to rewatch It Follows and Donnie Darko, true essential Halloween viewing, if you ask me.
Simon Fearn