General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Imaginary

Imaginary is a 2024 American supernatural horror film directed by Jeff Wadlow, in which a woman returning to her childhood home discovers that the imaginary friend she abandoned there is real and has attached itself to her young stepdaughter through a stuffed teddy bear named Chauncey.¹^•² It was produced by Jason Blum's Blumhouse Productions with Tower of Babble Entertainment and distributed by Lionsgate, opening in United States theaters on March 8, 2024.¹^•³

Key fact	Detail
Director and writers	Jeff Wadlow; screenplay by Wadlow, Greg Erb, and Jason Oremland¹
Production	Blumhouse Productions and Tower of Babble Entertainment; distributed by Lionsgate³
Cast	DeWanda Wise (Jessica), Tom Payne (Max), Taegen Burns (Taylor), Pyper Braun (Alice), Veronica Falcón (Dr. Alana Soto), Betty Buckley (Gloria)¹^•²
Release	Theatrical March 8, 2024 (wide, 3,118 theaters in North America); digital March 26, 2024⁴^•⁵
Runtime and rating	104 minutes; PG-13 for some violent content, drug material, and language⁶
Box office	$28,009,161 domestic, $15,769,599 international, $43,778,760 worldwide, against a reported $13 million production budget⁴^•⁶
Critical reception	25% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 105 reviews; 52% Popcornmeter from 500+ verified audience ratings³

Spoilers

Premise and plot

Jessica (DeWanda Wise) moves back into her childhood home with her husband Max and his two daughters, Taylor and Alice. Her youngest stepdaughter, Alice (Pyper Braun), finds a stuffed bear named Chauncey in the basement and develops an eerie attachment to it. The games Alice plays with Chauncey begin playfully and grow increasingly sinister, and as Alice's behavior becomes more concerning, Jessica intervenes and realizes that Chauncey is much more than a stuffed toy.¹

The film's tagline on its poster made the threat explicit: "He's not imaginary. And he's not your friend."⁷ Chauncey, visible only to Alice and Jessica, was once Jessica's own imaginary friend from childhood; she abandoned him when she moved away, and he now draws Alice into a harmful scavenger hunt meant to carry her to the "Never Ever," the place of his origin.⁸^•⁹^•¹⁵ When Alice is spirited away, Jessica, the older sister Taylor, and a well-informed neighbor named Gloria (Betty Buckley) mount a rescue mission into that world, which the British Film Institute's Sight and Sound review described as less Narnia or Neverland than David Lynch or M.C. Escher.⁷

The writers framed the story around Jessica's own history. Co-writer Greg Erb explained that the film is about an imaginary friend arriving in a child's life when the child needs a friend, who "just ends up being the wrong friend"; Jessica's backstory, in which her mother was dying and her father lost his mind, was written to explain why she had needed that emotional support as a girl and to parallel what Alice is going through.⁸

Development and writing

A four-year development. According to an interview with the three writers, Imaginary was in development for around four years, and its basic structure remained intact throughout. The team worked collaboratively in an office at Blumhouse, arranging note cards into acts labeled 1A, 2A, 2B, and 3 over about two weeks of outlining, in a dynamic closer to a television writers' room than to solitary writers taking successive passes. Wadlow acted as the "showrunner" because he also directed; when he moved into pre-production, Erb and Oremland took the lead on the script.⁸

Key late additions included the blended family and the friction between Taylor and Jessica, which the writers saw as essential so that the two could eventually unite to save Alice. The Never Ever underwent the most changes during development; the writers defined its rules and its dual character, at once the "magical happy place" described by Gloria and a disorienting space where, in Erb's words, "you don't know the rules and anything can happen." The horror style shifts accordingly, from grounded creepiness in the real world to a moving hallway of doors and levels. Rewriting continued into production as the writers responded to the actors' own interpretations of their characters.⁸

Release and box office

Lionsgate released Imaginary wide in North America on March 8, 2024, on 3,118 screens, after earliest international dates on March 6 in France and Belgium.⁴^•⁶ The film opened to $9,912,713 domestically, about 35 percent of its final domestic total, and finished with $28,009,161 in North America (64 percent of its gross) and $43,778,760 worldwide.⁴^•⁶ The Numbers reports a production budget of $13 million, making the worldwide gross about 3.4 times the budget; Bloody Disgusting's database lists the budget as $10 million.⁶^•¹⁰ A digital release followed on March 26, 2024, under three weeks after the theatrical opening.⁵

Reception

The film received broadly negative reviews from critics. On Rotten Tomatoes it holds a 25% Tomatometer from 105 reviews, with the site's critics consensus stating that the core concept is solid enough to produce a handful of scares but that too much of its potential is lost in a clichéd story bogged down in world-building; the audience Popcornmeter stood at 52%.³ Reviewers split over the same qualities: Empire gave it 2 of 5 stars and called it perilously close to a catastrophe, while Mashable described it as a "playfully deranged movie" suited to slumber parties.³

The Harvard Crimson criticized the film's execution as derivative of Coraline, citing shared elements including a doll-like entity, a hidden door into another world, spider imagery, and unsettling eyes on the otherworld's inhabitants, and faulted its reliance on exposition, particularly through the character of Gloria, while praising Pyper Braun's performance as Alice.⁹ Sight and Sound took a more favorable view, calling the film an expert essay in the domestic ghost story and describing Chauncey as an interesting monster kept from being overexposed.⁷

Context among 2024 imaginary-friend films

Imaginary was one of three 2024 releases built on imaginary friends, in three different registers. Sight and Sound placed it in the recent wave of domestic ghost stories alongside The Boogeyman (2023), Night Swim (2024), and Talk to Me (2022), and noted that horror had mined the imaginary-friend concept at least as early as "Captain Howdy" in The Exorcist (1973).⁷ Two months later, Paramount released IF, John Krasinski's family film about a girl who can see everyone's abandoned imaginary friends, starring Cailey Fleming and Ryan Reynolds; it opened on May 17, 2024 with a $35 million North American debut and a further estimated $20 million from 56 international markets.¹¹^•¹² Separately, Studio Ponoc's animated feature The Imaginary, directed by Yoshiyuki Momose and based on A.F. Harrold's 2014 children's novel about a girl named Amanda and her invisible companion Rudger, opened in Japan on December 15, 2023 and reached Netflix in the United States on July 5, 2024.¹³^•¹⁴

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Horror films (individual works) › Supernatural horror films › 2020s supernatural horror films › Titles symbols to L

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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