The horror landscape is feeling fairly full in 2026, but there is still room for one more major franchise to make a triumphant return in the next few weeks. Horror is having an incredible year in 2026, and it’s not just established franchises that have succeeded since the start of January. On the contrary, low-budget original horror movies like Obsession and Backrooms have left their more famous competitors in the dust.
Obsession and Backrooms have earned $286 million and $262 million in their first few weeks of release alone, swiftly dwarfing the seemingly impressive $216 million earned by the critically panned Scream 7. 2026 hasn’t been kind to the genre’s other legacy releases, with the reboots like Return to Silent Hill and Lee Cronin’s The Mummy and even direct sequels like 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple all failing to break the all-important $100 million mark.
However, there is one returning franchise that is unlikely to fall victim to this issue. Insidious: Out of the Further will bring the Insidious movies back to cinema screens for the first time since 2023’s Insidious: The Red Door, which became the franchise’s biggest box office success yet with a $189 million box office payday upon release. Despite earning mixed reviews, Insidious: The Red Door proved that there is plenty of life left in this ghostly franchise.
Insidious: Out of the Further Could Continue The Franchise’s Box Office Hot Streak
The last two Insidious sequels, 2018’s The Last Key and 2023’s The Red Door, were the franchise’s biggest box office successes ever, with The Last Key’s $167 million success outdoing the franchise’s previous high point, Insidious: Chapter 2’s $161 million gross. While the Insidious franchise timeline has become almost indecipherable at this point, this has seemingly done nothing to put viewers off the series.
The Insidious movies focus on the Lambert family and Lin Shaye’s medium Elise Rainier, who they hire in the hopes of saving their son from demonic possession. While Insidious and its sequel Insidious: Chapter 2 told a fairly straightforward story, 2015’s Insidious: Chapter 3 expanded the franchise’s focus to center on a new protagonist, while 2018’s prequel The Last Key brought back Elise but took place before the events of the original movie.
Insidious: Out of the Further Faces A Major Franchise Challenge
As if this wasn’t complicated enough, The Red Door then returned to the franchise’s original story by focusing on the Lambert family once more in a belated direct sequel to Insidious: Chapter 2. This means that August’s upcoming Insidious: Out of the Further will mark the first attempt to completely abandon the Lambert family storyline since Chapter 3, the lowest box office performer in the series so far.
This might sound like a foolhardy change, but there is reason to believe that the franchise’s choice to expand its scope is a smart one. One of 2025’s biggest horror hits, Predator: Badlands, radically reimagined what viewers expected from a Predator movie and was rewarded at both the box office and by critics, who hailed the sequel as a welcome reinvention of the series. That is something the Insidious franchise could undoubtedly benefit from, given its consitently mediocre reviews since Chapter 3.
Insidious: Out of the Further Isn’t The End of the Iconic Horror Series
Furthermore, Insidious: Out of the Further isn’t the only planned sequel that will expand the world of the supernatural horror series. Thread: An Insidious Tale, starring Mandy Moore and Kumail Nanjiani, has been in the works since 2024, and that ambitious spinoff will focus on all-new characters when a desperate married couple accidentally welcomes a demonic presence into their lives while trying to undo their child’s death. Thus, Insidious: Out of the Further may just be the beginning for the Insidious franchise’s return to the top of the horror genre.