In 99 percent of cases, any horror movie with a high concept central conceit can be relied upon to do a decent turn at the box office, but Cobweb was cursed to fail after being sent out to die at the box office so recently that it’s perfectly fine if you didn’t even know it was playing on the big screen to begin with.
Director Samuel Bodin’s haunting modern interpretation of some classic fairy tale tropes and trappings scored a decent 62 percent critical approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and even better 73 percent audience average. And yet, it limped out of theaters having barely earned $2 million in ticket sales, virtually unheard of for a studio-backed tale of terror.
Lionsgate made a horrendous decision in picking the release date, though, opting to have Cobeweb debut on the exact same day as two small, unheralded independent features called Barbie and Oppenheimer, and that’s without even mentioning the blockbuster holdovers creating immense competition for attention.
The good news is that the chilling fable has finally found a crowd on-demand, with FlixPatrol naming Cobweb as one of the Top 10 most-watched titles among iTunes users in the United States. Antony Starr and Lizzy Caplan topline the cast as the parents of a young boy who grows increasingly convinced the scratching, clawing, and interactions with something living inside the walls of his home are nowhere close to being a figment of his imagination, which eventually snowballs into a string of gut-punching revelations that turn his entire existence upside down.