Jenna Ortega & Melissa Barrera’s “Scream” Debuts at the Top of the Box Office Charts

Jenna Ortega & Melissa Barrera have plenty of reason to scream

Scream, starring the 19-year-old Mexican American & Puerto Rican actress and the 31-year-old Mexican actress, has dethroned Spider-Man: No Way Home over the four-day Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, becoming the first film to unseat the superhero phenomenon since it debuted on December 17.

Jenna Ortega & Melissa BarreraThe slasher revival grossed $34 million from 3,664 locations to top the box office. The impressive haul means that Paramount and Spyglass Media, the companies behind the reboot, will have one very profitable movie on their hands. Scream cost a mere $25 million to produce.

Scream has brought back a moribund franchise to life, introducing younger audiences to a series of films that had been left for dead after the box office disappointment of 2011’s Scream 4.

The key to its appeal was that Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, the directing duo behind Ready or Not, paid homage to the films that came before Scream while updating the series with a savage twist on toxic fandom that resonated with younger crowds.

The filmmakers brought back series veterans Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox and David Arquette and paired them with newcomers like Barrera, Ortega, Jack Quaid and Dylan Minnette. And the DNA remained largely the same — once again, a serial killer in a Ghostface mask comes up with grisly and creative ways to dispatch the townspeople of Woodsboro, California, an idyllic community with a great school system and a shockingly low life expectancy.