Love them or hate them; the Saw movies are a financial juggernaught. Each successive movie grosses either more, or the same, as the last. This weekend, with the release of Saw V, the franchise broke the record for the highest grossing horror franchise ever.

From Cinematical:

When you shelled out nine bucks this weekend to see if Jigsaw would do anything new in Saw V (answer: nope), you were also contributing to a milestone. With the Friday-Sunday $30 million haul, the Saw series is now the highest grossing horror franchise in history, with a cumulative domestic gross of $316 million. Just think of all the microcassette tapes and countdown timers that kind of money could buy!

In second place is the ‘Friday the 13th’ franchise with $315 million with ‘Nightmare on Elm St’ rounding out the top three with $307 million.

Granted all 5 Saw films have only grossed as much as one ‘Pirates Of The Caribbean’ or ‘The Dark Knight’ but as long as they can make them for next to nothing and rake in these kind of numbers, the franchise will continue.

Oh, and don’t count out ‘Friday the 13th’ just yet, with next year’s reboot on the way we could soon see a new front-runner.