The Terminally Online Showed Up in Theaters This Weekend for ‘Buddy’

For months, online ads have been peppering audiences with glimpses of Buddy, a ’90s children’s TV unicorn who turns creepy and murderous in what IndieWire called way back at Sundance the first great Midnight Movie of 2026. The distributors of the film “Buddy,” Roadside Attractions along with Saban Films, started introducing people to Buddy and his fake TV universe early and often, yet they kept the character’s mystique intact, releasing three teasers but never a full trailer that hinted too much at the film’s actual plot.

It was a big risk for a movie that is considerably strange, to the point that the first 30 minutes are almost entirely consumed within the world of a “Barney” parody. But the first teaser racked up 20 million views when it first dropped, and Buddy too amassed a following of 500,000 fans across social, which is enormous for an original horror character.

People delighted in a fan club in which you could text with Buddy or get voicemail messages from the character. Online, Buddy responded to brands like Care Bears as though he was also a real ’90s staple you may have just forgotten about. And some of the initial fans in the trailers’ comments likely created a lot of converts to “Too Many Cooks,” “Buddy” director Casper Kelly’s surreal, cult masterpiece that satirizes ’80s and ’90s sitcoms with an unshakeable jingle.

The question was whether all of those people would actually show up to the theater and take that online enthusiasm to the box office. The gambit paid off.

“Buddy” opened on just 1,258 screens this weekend and made $5.3 million, more than doubling initial tracking projections of around $2.5 million and making it one of the best limited release openings of the year. “Buddy” finished the weekend at No. 6 on the domestic chart, just behind “The Dog Stars,” which isn’t shabby, considering “Buddy” doesn’t star Jacob Elordi.

“It takes a big risk, and we felt like that risk might be exactly what makes the movie work,” Roadside Attractions head and co-founder Howard Cohen told IndieWire. “It was specifically the risk of content, its extreme originality, provocative structure, and themes.”

It’s the distributor’s second-best opening ever, behind only its biggest hit in its 23-year history, “I Can Only Imagine,” which opened to $17 million and made $83 million back in 2018. After just a single weekend, “Buddy” is one of Roadside’s biggest releases this decade in the post-COVID era. Saban Films set opening weekend records as well.

Roadside sees “Buddy” as “a star” and a potential new face in indie horror moving forward, a character that could be on par with the “Terrifier” franchise’s Art the Clown, if given the room to grow. Some of the better comps may be to a few other recent indie horror movies, including a couple it outpaced.

“Clown in a Cornfield” from last year, about a murderous clown named Frendo, opened to $3.6 million from even more screens and topped out at $7.2 million domestic. Luc Besson’s “Dracula” as released by one of Roadside’s frequent partners in Vertical earlier this year opened to $4.4 million and made $13 million domestic. It’s even comparable to some of Neon’s recent horror entries. “Leviticus,” another midnight movie out of this year’s Sundance, opened on only 1,000+ screens to $2.6 million and finished with $7.2 million, and “Hokum” opened on 1,800+ screens with a $6.4 million and $17 million domestic haul.

It’s a big shift for Roadside, which cut its teeth on prestige indies like “Manchester by the Sea,” “The Peanut Butter Falcon,” and “Mud.” Roadside and Saban acquired the title out of Sundance well before “Obsession” or “Backrooms” were in theaters, but they felt even then that “Buddy” could connect strongly with young people.

“We are focused on, where is the audience now? Who’s coming to the movies?,” Cohen said, pointing to trends in rising box office but falling attendance. “Most people now get their marketing for movies online, even the older demo. So the other forms of advertising that were very, very expensive, you can do a more economical and more focused release for movies online, and that’s been a big shift in what we’re doing.”

Cohen said the distributor’s other biggest release this year, the faith-based “A Great Awakening” about a young Benjamin Franklin, benefitted from a dedicated online campaign, even if it was targeting the +55 crowd. That film has made $8.1 million domestic as Roadside’s highest-grossing of 2026 so far, a number “Buddy” could likely catch if it manages to expand onto more screens during a busier Labor Day weekend. Roadside’s days of doing platform releases exclusively in New York and Los Angeles and relying on traditional ad buys or strong reviews are largely over.

“It’s all feeding into the choice of film, because in most cases it has to be a movie that you can market widely enough. The days of a movie being pure review and NPR-driven … you could still do it, but it’s much harder for like 10 different reasons,” Cohen said. “There are just not that many movies where it’s going to work, so it’s changed what you can release.”