Over the weekend, “Get Out” director Jordan Peele quietly made history when he became the first African-American writer-director to earn $100 million with his debut movie. 
 
 In its third weekend of release, the horror-satire continued to show long legs despite strong competition from two big blockbusters, “Logan” and “Kong: Skull Island.” The film only saw a 25 percent drop off from the previous weekend to hold to an estimated $21 million, bringing its domestic cume to an estimated $111 million. 
 
 The last movie with a black director to reach the $100 million mark was F. Gary Gray’s “Straight Outta Compton” in 2015. That film — Gray’s ninth as a director — had many more resources and people involved in its making than “Get Out.” It was written by Andrea Berloff and Jonathan Herman, given a $50 million budget, and had the added appeal of being based on the rise of the legendary rap group N.W.A., with its most prominent members, Dr. Dre and Ice Cube, attached as producers. 
 
 Also Read: 16 Movies With 100-Percent Fresh Ratings on Rotten Tomatoes (Photos) 
 
 Not only did Peele, who produced as well as wrote and directed “Get Out,” achieve the milestone with a $4 million budget and a largely unknown cast, he set a new studio record for Blumhouse in the process. “Get Out” only needed 16 days for its domestic cume to pass the nine-digit mark. 
 
 That breaks the record set by Blumhouse’s other 2017 hit, “Split,” which reached $100 million in 19 days. 
 
 Horror movies usually rely on a strong opening weekend for the majority of their box office haul, after which they hit a substantial drop-off in subsequent weeks. Not so for “Get Out.” 
 
 Also Read: 'Hidden Figures' Has Now Made More Money Than the Latest 'Star Trek,' 'X-Men' and 'Bourne' Films 
 
 The Universal/Blumhouse film was expected by trackers to make $24 million in its opening weekend. Instead, “Get Out” ended up beating that projection in both its first and second weekends, posting a $34 million opening before dropping off to $28 million in week two. ||||| Jordan Peele isn’t done winning. Over the weekend, the Key and Peele alum’s directorial debut, Get Out, officially crossed the $100 million mark, bringing its total domestic total to $111 million—a whopping sum compared to the film’s extremely modest $4.5 million budget. It’s an especially impressive feat for a first time director who cast relative unknown Daniel Kaluuya (Black Mirror) in a leading role. All those Hollywood excuses claiming that black actors can‘t carry a film to crossover box office success? They’re in the Sunken Place now. 
 
 Get Out, which Peele also wrote, is about a black man who discovers a horrifying family secret while visiting his white girlfriend’s parents for the first time. It’s a brilliant and layered meditation on both modern and historical racism, and an especially vital piece of filmmaking in this politically charged era. Peele also filled it the film with Easter eggs and references to classic horror films, inspiring fans to see the movie more than once in theaters in order to catch things they might have missed the first time. 
 
 Video: Allison Williams and Daniel Kaluuya Talk Racism . . . 
 
 Get Out’s success also makes it the fastest Blumhouse title to cross the $100 million mark, according to Deadline. The horror distributor previously fostered the Paranormal Activity franchise and recently released M. Night Shyamalan’s surprise blockbuster Split. “Most genre films drop in the second weekend by at least 60 percent,” Deadline notes—but Get Out has only suffered slight dips at the box office, indicating that it has some serious staying power. 
 
 The success bodes well for Peele’s ambitions to write and direct an entire series of social thrillers. In a recent interview with IndieWire, Peele said he has more films with similar themes in store. 
 
 “The best and scariest monsters in the world are human beings and what we are capable of especially when we get together,” he said. “I’ve been working on these premises about these different social demons, these innately human monsters that are woven into the fabric of how we think and how we interact, and each one of my movies is going to be about a different one of these social demons.” ||||| Jordan Peele’s Get Out will become the fastest Blumhouse title to cross the $100 million mark, hitting the target in 16 days and beating Split (19 days), Paranormal Activity 3 (23 days) and Paranormal Activity (50 days). 
 
 The Universal release, which cost only an estimated $4.5M before P&A, crosses the mark tonight, and by tomorrow will have accumulated $111M. 
 
 As a horror movie, Get Out is truly an exception. Most genre films drop in the second weekend by at least 60% and are front-loaded. But Get Out continues to impress with only slight dips. Last weekend, the movie eased a jawdropping 15% for $28M (the best hold for a horror film since Dracula 2000), and this weekend Get Out is set to pull in $21M, just 24% down. In these diving Trump times, many rival distributors observe that Get Out hits a nerve with the audience, and that’s why audiences keep coming back (even though Peele, who wrote, doesn’t appear in the hysterical movie). 
 
 Get Out tells the story of Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) an African American young man who goes to meet his white girlfriend’s (Allison Williams) family (Bradley Whitford, Catherine Keener) for the first time. But they’re not normal people, and Chris needs to Get Out of their house. 
 
 Peele initially moved forward with the movie when he pitched it to QC Entertainment’s Sean McKittrick. Edward H. Hamm is also a producer. 
 
 At the Sundance Film Festival where Get Out was the secret screening, Peele shared his inspirations for the film: “We had this black president and we’re living in this post-racial lie. This whole idea that we’ve passed it all. For me, and many black people out there, there’s racism. I experience it on an everyday basis. This movie was meant to reveal that there’s the monster of racism lurking underneath these seemingly innocent conversations and situations. It’s been fascinating watching the last few years develop, because now the movie is coming out in a very different America from where it began. I think it’s more important now, and far more interesting now. I respect Universal for having the f*cking balls leaning into this kind of sh*t.” 
 
 Peele produced the movie through his Monkeypaw Productions. The pic begins its overseas rollout on March 17. Get Out earned an A- CinemaScore –a very rare feat for a horror film– with critics embracing it with a 99% certified fresh Rotten Tomatoes score. ||||| NEW YORK (AP) — There have been monster gorillas and sharp-clawed superheroes at the box office this month, but the biggest beast of them all has been Jordan Peele’s $4.5 million, race-exploding thriller “Get Out.” 
 
 In just 16 days, Peele’s low-budget self-described “social horror” film has already crossed the $100 million mark. While “Get Out,” made by Blumhouse Productions and released by Universal Pictures, doesn’t match the hefty global totals of “Logan” or “Kong: Skull Island,” few films can touch its extreme profitability — or its firm grip of the zeitgeist. 
 
 “‘Get Out’ isn’t a Redbox, VOD, iTunes movie,” Peele said recently on Twitter. “If you don’t see it with the theater energy, you’ll miss the full intended experience.” 
 
 And moviegoers have taken the advice. “Get Out” made $21.1 million in its third weekend, according to studio estimates Sunday, bringing its total to $111 million. Whereas most movies — especially horror films — drop considerably after opening weekend, “Get Out” has barely slipped. It dropped about 15 percent after its first weekend, and 25 percent after its second. 
 
 “Get Out,” which is the directorial debut of the former “Key and Peele” star, first led the box office the same weekend “Moonlight” won best picture at the Academy Awards. It also follows the spectacular success of the Oscar-nominated “Hidden Figures,” which has made more than $160 million since its No. 1 wide-release debut in early January. 
 
 For those who still cling to the old stereotype that films led by black actors are limited at the box office, 2017 is making an already difficult to defend notion downright ridiculous. And “Get Out” has done it without a big name; it stars British actor Daniel Kaluuya as an African-American photographer whose white girlfriend (Allison Williams) brings him home to meet her family (Bradley Whitford, Catherine Keener). 
 
 “It’s time to put to bed the idea that movies with any kind of cast don’t perform at the box office. The only thing audiences care about is whether a movie is good or not,” says Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for comScore. 
 
 The success of “Get Out,” Dergarabedian says, has been driven by its quality (at 99 percent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, it’s the best-reviewed film of the year), its capacity to entertain and its ability to remain in the conversation. “You can’t just put this movie in a box,” he says. 
 
 And audiences for “Get Out” have been notably diverse, with 39 percent black, 36 percent white and 17 percent Latino on opening weekend. 
 
 In some ways, “Get Out” — where deep and violent racism is papered over by smiles and protests of liberal enlightenment — suggests the movie theater is already a different place since before Donald Trump’s presidency. Peele conceived of his movie years ago as a rebuke to the Obama-era idea of a post-racial America, but it has struck many as an unusually timely film. 
 
 “‘Get Out’ shows how the public racism of (the civil rights era) has hidden itself by burrowing like a ravenous tapeworm into the bowels of America, growing fatter each year as it feeds off good intentions and bad faith,” Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wrote in a Hollywood Reporter column that called “Get Out” “‘Invasion of the Black Body Snatchers’ for the Trump era.” 
 
 The comedy website FunnyOrDie made even more direct parallels, re-cutting the film’s trailer to put Trump — who has defended himself as “the least racist person that you ever met” — in the father’s role and Ivanka as the daughter. It’s been watched by more than 3.6 million. 
 
 Audiences have recently been showing a hunger for films that confront race issues head-on. Raoul Peck’s Oscar-nominated James Baldwin documentary “I Am Not Your Negro” has made $5.8 million since opening last month, an exceptional result for any documentary, particularly a literary-minded one. Ava Duvernay’s Oscar-nominated documentary about the historical roots of mass incarceration, “The 13th,” has also been a hit on Netflix. 
 
 “Original” and “though-provoking” are suddenly looking like profitable qualities in a movie landscape that has been (and still is) overwhelmed with sequels, reboots and brand-name adaptations. That’s good news for indie distributors like A24 (which released “Moonlight”) and production companies like Blumhouse that are forging a more cutting-edge cinema predicated on filmmakers with singular visions. Blumhouse was also behind M. Night Shyamalan’s “Split,” which, with $135.8 million in box office, is also one of the biggest successes of 2017.) 
 
 Peele, for his part, has said “Get Out” is just the start for him. He is planning a series of films about our “social demons.” 
 
 ___ 
 
 Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP
– Get Out is the fastest film in the Blumhouse movie production company's portfolio to reach $100 million, hitting that mark in just 16 days (the previous record-holder was Split in 19 days), Deadline notes. The movie's director, Jordan Peele, has also claimed a milestone, reports the Wrap: He's the first African-American writer-director to make $100 million with a debut movie; the film has so far brought in a $111 million domestic take. The site notes that Peele accomplished this with just $4.5 million to work with and a cast that was bereft of A-listers, including Catherine Keener, Bradley Whitford, Allison Williams, and Black Mirror star Daniel Kaluuya. The film, which Peele has described as a "social horror" flick, per the AP, didn't slow much in its third weekend of release, which pitted it against blockbusters like Logan and Kong: Skull Island. Vanity Fair points out Peele's feat also dismantles a long-time Hollywood belief: that a crossover film like this can't be helmed by a black actor and still be a smash at the box office. "The only thing audiences care about is whether a movie is good or not," Paul Dergarabedian, a senior media analyst for measurement company comScore, tells the AP, adding that Get Out has done so well because it's a high-quality film that both entertains and addresses issues that people want to talk about afterward. Supposedly what's next on Peele's plate: a film about "social demons."