Jordan Peele Becomes First Black Writer-Director to Gross $100M with Debut Movie

With Get Out, Jordan Peele has made history as the first black writer-director to gross $100 million with their debut film.

Get Out, which was made with a relatively slim $4 million budget, has garnered rave reviews from critics and attained the coveted 100 percent on Rotten Tomatoes (before someone had to ruin it and give it a single Rotten score, pulling it down to 99 percent, but we’re just going to ignore that). The horror-satire film earned an 8.7 in our review, in which Paste film critic Andy Crump begs Peele for another movie, and soon. In the short three weeks that Get Out has been in theaters, people have already changed the way they look at race and horror in films, and the movie won’t be released in the U.K. until March 17, so there’s no telling how much the film is going to gross at the box office worldwide.

Before the massive success of Get Out, Peele was mainly known for being the other half of the comedy duo behind their eponymous Comedy Central sketch show Key and Peele, along with actor Keegan-Michael Key. Now, Peele has launched into directorial stardom. He says he’s already working on new material as a follow-up to Get Out that explores similar scary monsters, aka humans. In an interview with IndieWire, Peele 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.” We like the sound of multiple Peele movies to come. Can we also throw a television series and a franchise or two in there?

You can watch the trailer for Get Out below, and don’t miss Paste’s “How Get Out Deftly Tackles Privilege and the Minority Experience.”