Sydney Sweeney isn’t the only one riding high after The Housemaid took off at the box office. The erotic thriller’s strong opening and solid performance are doing wonders for everyone involved, including Amanda Seyfried, who brings a bit more experience to the table than her younger co-star.
The movie just hit another milestone that’s worth talking about. In less than a week, The Housemaid has already made more than Seyfried’s 2009 film Chloe, which has pretty much disappeared from memory. The Housemaid’s domestic gross is sitting at $26 million, exactly double what Chloe managed during its entire run. Chloe had Julianne Moore and Liam Neeson alongside Seyfried and actually broke personal box office records for Canadian director Atom Egoyan, but it still wasn’t what anyone would call a commercial hit.
Paul Feig directed The Housemaid, and he’s got a track record with this kind of pulpy material. He made the similarly twisty A Simple Favor and Another Simple Favor after spending years crushing it in mainstream comedy. The movie opened to mostly positive reviews and audiences absolutely ate it up.
It’s currently sitting at a “certified fresh” 76% critics’ score and a “verified hot” 92% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. The consensus there reads: “A sly throwback to the lurid thrillers that used to dominate multiplexes, The Housemaid cleans up nicely thanks to its wicked sense of fun and a delightfully unnerving performance from Amanda Seyfried.”
Seyfried’s been on a pretty impressive run lately. She earned an Oscar nomination for her performance in David Fincher’s Mank and won an Emmy for her work in the Hulu series The Dropout. Chloe is basically a footnote on her resume at this point. That erotic thriller got mixed reviews and is stuck at a 52% score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Sweeney, though, really needed this win. She’d delivered four major flops in a row before The Housemaid showed up and changed the conversation. The movie has already overtaken the combined domestic haul of those four bombs in under a week, which is pretty wild when you think about it.
It’s now Sweeney’s top grossing film since Madame Web, and that superhero disaster is about to get passed this weekend as The Housemaid battles it out with the holdover animated hit David and the wide expansion of Marty Supreme for the third spot at the box office.
After The Housemaid overtook a couple of major past erotic thrillers at the domestic box office, it’s clear this movie is doing exactly what Sweeney needed it to do. She’s back in the game, and Seyfried gets to add another commercial success to her growing list of wins.
You can catch The Housemaid in theaters right now.
