The Invisible Man, a Universal Pictures monster movie made for $7 million, took the #1 slot at the box office this weekend with a cool $29 million. Alternatively The Mummy, a Universal Pictures monster movie made for north of $150 million, opened to $31.7 million in 2017. Let this be a lesson that studios don’t have to “event-ize” everything budget-wise to make a film that’s respectable, popular, and effective, as evidenced by the incredibly similar debut numbers and incredibly different budgets here.

Indeed, The Invisible Man was greenlit in the wake of Universal scrapping its planned Dark Universe and instead making Universal monster movies on an individualized basis. Filmmaker Leigh Whannell pitched a domestic abuse take on The Invisible Man that makes the victim the protagonist—the story of a survivor tormented by her supposedly dead husband, gaslit by those around her—and the result is a genuinely terrifying, handsomely crafted horror thriller with thematic resonance and an Oscar-worthy performance by Elisabeth Moss to boot.

the-invisible-man-image-elisabeth-moss
Image via Universal Pictures

The film, which was also produced by Blumhouse, has earned critical praise and pulled in a B+ CinemaScore (great for a horror film), and has now pulled in nearly $50 million worldwide after one week in release. That’s an excellent start, and I would not be surprised if Universal next asked Whannell to either make an Invisible Man sequel or tackle a different Universal monster. It’ll be interesting to see how The Invisible Man fares in the weeks to come. Word of mouth should be kind, so I have a feeling Universal has a pretty huge hit on its hands.

Elsewhere at the box office, Sony’s Sonic the Hedgehog fell to the #2 slot but still managed$16 million for its third weekend of release, bringing its domestic haul to a pretty great $128.2 million. Worldwide the well-received video game adaptation has amassed nearly $250 million. 20th Century Studios’ Call of the Wild pulled in $13.2 million for third place, bringing its worldwide total to $79.3 million after two weeks in release.

Check out the full Top 10 below.

Rank

Title

Weekend

Total

1.

The Invisible Man

$29,000,000

$29,000,000

2.

Sonic the Hedgehog

$16,000,000

$128,293,652

3.

Call of the Wild

$13,205,000

$45,860,651

4.

My Hero Academia: Heroes Rising

$5,109,247

$8,482,448

5.

Bad Boys for Life

$4,300,000

$197,368,385

6.

Birds of Prey

$4,100,000

$78,782,133

7.

Impractical Jokers: The Movie

$3,545,000

$6,622,091

8.

1917

$2,670,000

$155,867,069

9.

Brahms: The Boy II

$2,622,381

$9,770,000

10.

Fantasy Island

$2,330,000

$24,059,653