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Kim Hollis: The Gallows, the latest low-budget horror flick from Blumhouse, debuted with $9.8 million. What do you think of this result?

Ben Gruchow: In one weekend, The Gallows out-grossed the entire worldwide take of The Babadook. By next weekend, it'll have out-grossed It Follows. To paraphrase Abe Simpson, this angries up the blood.

Almost $10 million is a fairly decent opening weekend; it's on the high end for a found-footage horror film around now. I fully expect it to crater next weekend and be off the face of the earth in three.

Jason Barney: Despite the reviews and how quickly it will evaporate, it is a success. A film like this being made for less than a million? Opening to over $10 million? Most studios wish they could find that kind of success with bigger franchise type movies. It will drop big time in the next couple of weeks and be gone by August. There is no doubt about the profit, though.

Matthew Huntley: What Ben and Jason said. This is your typical "low-budget, found footage movie that covers-its-entire-production-costs-in-a-single-weekend" story. We've heard it before; we'll hear it again. Good for the movie and the marketplace, but probably not the best movie-going experience, as these tend not to be of the highest quality.

Edwin Davies: This is another fine result for Blumhouse who have shown a pretty much unerring knack for turning low-budgets into moderate grosses. Though they're operating on a much lower level to most companies, I think their current run of profitable hits is hugely impressive in the way that they have managed to find an under-served audience and managed to make a pretty decent profit off of it.

Ryan Kyle: I am really shocked by this result since the film looked absolutely terrible and the R-rating blocks out the more gullible teens that fall for this kind of crap. However, made for pennies and hitting what seems to be the average ceiling for a Blumhouse flick, I would call this opening a success even though the film will struggle to reach $20 million total.

Michael Lynderey: The highest-grossing horror film this year is still Insidious Chapter 3, at $51 million, if we don't count Jurassic World (which has taken in a bit more than Insidious). So it's not been a particularly strong year for the genre, and The Gallows is the kind of middling product that just marks time between horror films. There's another one in a few weeks, The Vatican Tapes, but I don't think the genre will break out to bigger numbers until October, when we get more interesting fare like Crimson Peak and Goosebumps. I think it would be good for horror films to move away from the shaky-cam exorcism scenario. It's time for a new trend to get here.

Max Braden: It may not last, but it goes to show that the feature film format in media will always have some success selling cheap thrills.

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