Weekend Preview: ‘Primate’ Represents 2026’s Baseline Horror

One of the first major studio releases of the year this weekend is Primate, going up against January veteran Gerard Butler in Greenland 2: Migration. Also crowding the schedule is a host of holiday holdovers and one of theaters’ greatest enemies: football. Despite the formidable competition, Primate has a definite edge on its side thanks to its genre. Horror accounted for many of 2025’s over-performances, and the 2026 film slate is ready to double down. Nearly every week from January through February sports a new horror title ranging from niche to original to franchise, each highly anticipated by specific audience segments. How does Primate stack up?

Despite great word-of-mouth from the festival circuit and horror-producing maestro Walter Hamada in its corner, Primate appeared to be a niche play rather than a January breakout. Early on in tracking, it became clear that the true comps for the film would not be January mainstays or even specifically first quarter horror releases. Instead, niche horror films directly targeting the genre’s fans boasted far more similar audience signals than general “creature feature” fare. 

Expanding the search found overlapping  patterns with Keeper, The Monkey and even Heretic, even as  Primate lacked some of the same name brand talent and creative hooks at the forefront of marketing. Primate fell in line with those three films, trending higher than Keeper but lower than The Monkey. Much like the genre’s normal standards, tracking revealed a similar ratio of locked-in, theatrically interested base of horror fans consisting of mostly younger audiences almost evenly split between men and women. Once that ratio is firmly engaged, breakout films must reach beyond this audience to guarantee solid walk-ups and ticket sales. This is especially true for younger moviegoers, specifically younger female moviegoers who tend to make the difference between an average opening and a new horror franchise in the making.

Although Primate’s Awareness and Interest has seen pre-release gains, these improvements seem to be transferring more to our Willingness to Pay metric, which reflects audience’s desire to buy a ticket, make a VOD transaction, or sign up to a streamer to watch. This is a good sign for later returns on the film’s digital release, but not a sign of momentum for opening weekend attendance. Still, notable last-minute gains across the board with the core target demo of young men suggests the film could open on the higher end of our projections and in line with Universal’s own smaller horror releases.  

Widespread awareness appeared to be Primate’s greatest challenge. But as opening weekend drew closer, it was able to close the awareness-to-theater gap closer to the 1-to-1 ratio of a properly motivated audience. This helps to secure not only an interested audience from the under-35 crowd, but one that is more motivated to show up in theaters.

Horror fans reliably turnout in theaters in recent years, and especially in 2025.  This provides original content with a strong starting base before hopefully branching out with strategic awareness and motivated interest to become the next success story. Keeping this foundation  in mind to fall back on and further develop  will be key to upcoming horror openings.

Now it’s up for the weekend to decide if Primate can drive a jaw-dropping opening to kick off horror films for the rest of 2026.