How many Paranormal Activity movies are there?
The Paranormal Activity franchise keeps growing, quietly, and as it grows it continues to amass legions of new fans who discover the movies and their brilliance as time goes on. There’s a new movie on the way, too: Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin, which arrives on Paramount+ on Oct. 29, 2021. So how many Paranormal Activity movies are there?
If you include the newest installment of the franchise, there are seven movies in the franchise that tell stories through “found footage”. The first movie arrived in 2007 and was a smash hit. It grossed over $193 million at the global box office despite its $15,000 budget to film. Not surprisingly, Hollywood came calling and the franchise was born.
There are seven movies in the Paranormal Activity franchise
After the first movie took off at the box office, it was followed by a sequel in 2010. This time the movie had a $3 million budget and grossed a respectable $177 million globally. The last new movie, Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension, was released in 2015 and made $78 million worldwide.
One of the possible reasons that the last two sequels didn’t perform as strongly as the first four movies is that the first four all revolved around the franchise’s main characters Katie and Kristi. Whether they’re adults with families of their own (PA 1, 2 and 4) or younger Katie and Kristi (PA 3 and The Ghost Dimension), the story of how the sisters ended up being haunted by the mysterious demon Toby is what really drove the franchise.
The fifth movie, The Marked Ones, is loosely tied to the overall story through the cult that “marks” people, just as Katie and Kristi were marked as children by the same cult.
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Next of Kin is produced by Oren Peli, the creator of the franchise who wrote and directed the original movie. It remains to be seen how the new movie connects to the other films in the franchise or if the story is about to take off in a new direction to kickstart the franchise anew.
Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin streams on Paramount+ on Oct. 29, 2021.