Posted in: Lionsgate, Movies | Tagged: Lionsgate UK, the housemaid

How Lionsgate Made The Housemaid Into UK Box Office Christmas Hit

How Lionsgate made The Housemaid into their big UK box office Christmas hit, as told to the United Kingdom Cinema Association

In an industry dominated by franchises and tentpoles, a thoughtfully marketed thriller can still break out in spectacular fashion. That was the story of The Housemaid, a 2025 American erotic psychological thriller film directed by Paul Feig, written by Rebecca Sonnenshine and based on the 2022 novel by Freida McFadden, and starring Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried. In the film, Millie Calloway, a young woman with a troubled past, becomes the live-in maid for a wealthy family whose household hides dark secrets. It grossed $400 million on a $35 million budget, and a sequel, The Housemaid's Secret, is in development, with Feig and Sweeney set to return and scheduled for release in December 2027.

In the British Isles, it did even better, relatively to the market. The film was expected to be a medium-sized release, but exploded into one of Lionsgate's biggest-ever successes in the UK and Ireland last year. The Housemaid became Lionsgate UK's second-highest-grossing film of all time, behind only The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. It opened well but reached 7.3 times its opening-weekend multiplier, compared to Avatar: Fire and Ash, released at the same time, which reached 4.8 times. So what do they credit this performance to? Giving a presentation to the United Kingdom Cinema Association (UKCA), Paul Sophocli, Senior Theatrical Sales Manager at Lionsgate UK, and Joe Palmer, Head of Marketing, broke down exactly how it happened.

Firstly, a runtime of 131 minutes. "A film called The Housemaid does not need to be as long as Lawrence of Arabia", said Sophocli. "That made a huge difference. It was programme-friendly," and this is "something we have reiterated to the US with regards to the sequel." Internal targets were modest, just £15 million. The film more than doubled that: "We overindexed by two and a half times as much as the US." The film was scheduled for Boxing Day, but they ran previews before Christmas, which raked in £1.36 million, followed by a £3 million Boxing Day weekend, including a single-day UK high of £709,000, the biggest Boxing Day score since Little Women in 2019. "It opened at number two, and it stayed at number two for two weeks. Then it got to number one in weeks three, four, and five. It was the cinematic equivalent of Bryan Adams", Sopocle said.

The team screened the film for exhibitors on the 30th October, two months ahead of release, and held a multimedia presentation in early December. "If you've got a good film and the US allows you, you've got to screen it early," Sopocle emphasised. "It's an easy thing to say, but there is a lot of red tape… especially when you're dealing with the US." And he is  proud that this success came without a single member of the actors or crew visiting the UK and with no UK premiere.

Instead, as Joe Palmer told us, they sent BookTokker Francesca Pavis to the film set with Sydney Sweeney, then to the red carpet at the LA premiere. And this was part of a campaign that worked with "literally hundreds of micro influencers to react to everything that we put out into the world."

@pavisfrancesca 📢 On set with Freida McFadden !!!! AD The Housemaid girlies, it's our time 🥹 The BIGGEST thank you to @Lionsgate UK for this. The Housemaid movie is in cinemas from December 26th. I cannot wait to debrief with you all 😳 — #thehousemaid #thehousemaidfilm #freidamcfadden ♬ original sound – Francesca's Books

Joe Palmer outlined a disciplined marketing approach. "Put simply, females and specifically 15 to 44. That was our primary target audience and something that we were very strict about… We didn't want to get bogged down or distracted by other opportunity audiences. We wanted to be really clear that this was an audience that we were going to super serve. It wasn't until about 2 weeks out from release that we started considering wider audiences, 45-plus females or any males." The team led with the film's two female leads, only bringing in the male co-star strategically.

The campaign drew inspiration from elevated thrillers like Fifty Shades of Grey, Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, smart book-to-film adaptations, "Or at least they were presented as such. They were minimally designed campaigns and artwork that were simple, clean, and precise. The US artwork, Palmer noted, was "great for broad popcorn audiences. It wasn't what we needed and didn't have enough of a connection to The Housemaid book artwork."

"What we did was brief Empire Design on hundreds of different options that we could change the artwork for the UK and Ireland campaign… It was artwork that felt slick, simple, elevated, and had a strong colour link back to the original book artwork. I'm not pointing this out to say that this artwork is why The Housemaid overconverted so impressively in the UK. Of course it's not. But it's a good example of a seemingly small local nuance that we identified and then explored literally hundreds of routes to best serve our audience. And it was that care and rigour that we applied to every element of the campaign."

They leaned heavily into the Boxing Day release, positioning the film as the must-see holiday event to avoid spoilers and join the cultural conversation and sent festive Christmas cards from the Winchester family, with subtle blood smears inside. And then there was the Wicked sequel. "Wicked For Good opened 5 weeks before The Housemaid, offering a sheer volume of eyeballs that we couldn't miss, even if we meant even if it meant cutting a seemingly impossible PG-rated trailer for this 15 movie. With thanks to creative agency Silk Factory and the BBFC, who I have to say were quite lenient here, we scraped through with the necessary rating to add millions of eyeballs at a crucial time in the run-up to our release." It took nineteen attempts to get the trailer passed for the audience.

Early influencer screenings began in December, featuring key BookTok voices and content from these screenings, plus clips from the US premieres, were repurposed into paid advertising to generate FOMO.

"We had some money that we could use for other things. So we pivoted into early screenings and the ability to do that was vital for the campaign success… flooding social media channels with one clear message: that you have to see this movie to believe it." Here are a few of those;

They state that the paid media delivered over 85 million impressions and reached more than 95% of females aged 18–44 in December. When the film opened strongly and held even better, Lionsgate UK says they doubled down. "If there's one thing that we do incredibly well at Lionsgate, it's that we back our winners. The UK box office number one smash hit became our primary message, and we hammered that out for five weeks. We spent more than we've ever spent on sustained media chasing down a huge conversion, a seven times opening and over £32 million at the UK box." And they plan to do it all again for Christmas 2027 and the sequel, The Handmaid's Secret…

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