Tarot has accomplished a huge box office feat despite a cavalcade of negative reviews. The new horror movie, which stars Harriet Slater, Avantika, and Jacob Batalon, is based on the 1992 Nicholas Adams novel Horrorscope and follows a group of college students who play with a cursed deck of tarot cards that dooms them to die in twisted ways based on the cards that were pulled in their readings. The movie has earned a thoroughly Rotten 21% score on Rotten Tomatoes at the time of writing, a number that is based on 42 different critics’ reviews.

Per Variety, the Tarot release is projected to earn an additional $3.4 million at the domestic box office by the end of its second weekend in theaters. Combined with its second-weekend international grosses, this will bring its cumulative global box office total to $20 million. Considering the fact that the movie only cost $8 million to make, this nearly triples the horror title’s production budget in just 10 days.

Is Tarot A Box Office Hit?

The Horror Movie May Have Hit Its Break-Even Point

Because theaters keep half of ticket sales, a movie’s break-even point is usually at least twice its production budget. Despite those negative Tarot reviews, the movie has already surpassed $16 million at the box office, which was most likely its break-even point. In fact, at the time of writing, it is the sixth highest-grossing English-language horror movie of the year worldwide. Below, see how the movie’s budget and box office compares to the current Top 5 English-language horror titles of 2024 so far:

Rank

#17
Night Swim
$15 million
$30 million
$54 million
+ $24 million

#18
The First Omen
$30 million
$60 million
$52.5 million
– $7.5 million

#20
Imaginary
$10-13 million
$20-26 million
$39.1 million
+ ~$13 million

#21
Abigail
$28 million
$56 million
$35.9 million
– $20.1 million

#31
Immaculate
$9 million
$18 million
$23.2 million
+ $5.2 million

~#38
Tarot
$8 million
$16 million
$20 million
+ $4 million

One issue with the break-even point rule of thumb is the fact that it doesn’t include marketing costs for the movies in question. This means that some of the titles with a positive balance may not have yet made their money back, depending on how much was spent promoting them. However, Tarot came with quite low marketing costs, as there wasn’t a huge promotional push for the title, with horror-hungry audiences seeming to have found the movie relatively organically.

While it seems unlikely that the movie has yet earned a significant profit, it may already be in the black. If it can push this gross even higher in the coming weeks, it’s even possible that it will be considered a proper box office hit and that a sequel will be greenlit before long. The Tarot ending is not necessarily open-ended, but it does leave room for more stories to be told at different points in the timeline of the movie’s universe, whether or not the stars who played the surviving characters return to the project.