This year’s reboot of The Strangers wasn’t a good movie at all, but to be completely fair, the slasher retread grossed nearly $50 million worldwide against a shoestring budget of $8.5 million .

While not nearly as successful as the original Strangers – which grossed $82.4 million in 2008 – The Strangers: Chapter 1 was certainly a solid earner for the sequel The Strangers: Prey at Night, which collected 32, $1 million in 2018.

However, Lionsgate has director Renny Harlin shoot an entire trilogy of new Strangers movies back-to-back, with Chapter 2 due out next year and Chapter 3 at an unspecified date. Except that, given that Chapter 1 earned a “C” CinemaScore, it doesn’t exactly suggest that there’s much public interest in seeing this story become a trilogy.

So it’s reasonable to expect the law of diminishing returns to kick in quickly, with the second and third films likely grossing considerably less than Chapter 1.

Although sequels are basically too low-budget to bomb, squeezing a trio of mediocre films in quick succession seems like an easy way to kill off general interest in the horror brand in record time. They are not thinking about the long game here at all.