MaXXXine (2024) is Ti West’s horror film closing his X trilogy, with Mia Goth’s Maxine Minx chasing stardom through 1985 Los Angeles.
Six years after she walked away from a Texas farmhouse full of bodies, Maxine Minx is in Hollywood and still refusing to accept a life she does not deserve. MaXXXine is the third and final chapter of the trilogy that began with X and Pearl in 2022, and it moves the story into the city of dreams at its seediest: peep shows, video stores, studio backlots and a real-life panic over the Night Stalker. Ti West wrote, directed, produced and edited it, Mia Goth returns as Maxine, and the film turns the decade’s moral panic into its villain. It became the biggest box-office earner of the three.
At a glance
| Director | Ti West |
| Written by | Ti West |
| Producers | Jacob Jaffke, Ti West, Kevin Turen, Harrison Kreiss; Mia Goth also produced (credited as producer or executive producer across records) |
| Starring | Mia Goth, Elizabeth Debicki, Moses Sumney, Michelle Monaghan, Bobby Cannavale, Halsey, Lily Collins, Giancarlo Esposito, Kevin Bacon |
| Cinematography | Eliot Rockett |
| Editing | Ti West |
| Music | Tyler Bates |
| Production company | Motel Mojave |
| Distributor | A24 |
| Premiere | June 24, 2024, TCL Chinese Theatre, Los Angeles |
| Release date | July 5, 2024 (United States) |
| Running time | 104 minutes (some databases list 103) |
| Rating | R |
| Budget | under $10 million, per trade coverage; no official figure published |
| Box office | $22,057,160 worldwide |
| Series | third and final film of the X trilogy, after X (2022) and Pearl (2022) |
Plot
The film opens on a home-movie frame: young Maxine being schooled by her preacher father in the mantra that runs through the whole trilogy, that she will not accept a life she does not deserve. Then it is 1985, Los Angeles is gripped by the Night Stalker murders, and Maxine Minx, sole survivor of the Texas massacre six years earlier, successfully auditions for the lead in the horror sequel The Puritan II. It is her first legitimate role after a career in adult films.
Her friend Leon, a video-store clerk, and her colleague Amber James share the news. Amber invites her to a party in the Hollywood Hills, and Maxine declines, twice, the second time to fellow performer Tabby Martin.
At her second job, a live peep show, a silent figure in black leather watches her with visible anger. Walking home, she is cornered in an alley by a man in a Buster Keaton costume brandishing a switchblade. Maxine pulls a gun, forces him to strip and put the barrel in his mouth, then crushes his testicles with her boot. She is not a woman who waits to be rescued.
The leather-clad figure leaves her a police-evidence VHS tape: the adult film she and her dead friends were shooting in Texas, with the murders of X on it. She asks Leon to trace where it came from. Then Amber and Tabby are found murdered in the Hollywood Hills, their bodies branded with Satanic symbols, and a city already in a panic blames the Night Stalker.
A private investigator, John Labat, confronts Maxine: his unnamed employer knows her past, and she is to appear at an address on Starlight Drive that night or be exposed. Detectives Williams and Torres of the LAPD question her about Tabby and Amber, and she tells them nothing. She confides in her agent, Teddy Knight, who agrees to help, ignores the summons and starts learning her lines. When Labat tails her, she attacks him and warns him off.
Leon is slaughtered in his video store. On the Puritan II set Maxine meets Molly Bennett, star of the first Puritan, who mentions the same Hollywood Hills party. A furious Labat chases Maxine across the Universal Studios lot at gunpoint, and she hides among the backlot sets, the Psycho house among them, until security escorts him off.
Maxine turns the tables. She baits Labat into following her, and with Knight and her friend Shepard Turei she ambushes him, traps him in his car and has him crushed in a junkyard compressor.
The killer and the ending
The killer is not the Night Stalker. Richard Ramirez is the film’s backdrop and red herring, the name everyone reaches for. At the Starlight Drive address Maxine finds Molly Bennett’s dismembered body in a suitcase, and the man behind it all: her estranged father, the televangelist Ernest Miller. With followers from his ministry, he has been murdering the people around her to isolate her and filming the killings to build a snuff film exposing Hollywood’s sin. He means to save his daughter on camera, and he has her tied to a tree for a filmed exorcism.
Detectives Torres and Williams interrupt. The shootout kills Miller’s followers and wounds Miller, and both detectives are fatally wounded pursuing him. Freed, Maxine takes a shotgun and confronts her father at the Hollywood sign under a police helicopter’s spotlight.
Here the film cuts away to a fantasy: Maxine fêted as the woman who stopped the killer, a Puritan II premiere, a biopic of her life to be directed by Elizabeth Bender. It is what she sees for herself, not what happens. Back at the sign, she tells her father he gave her what she needed, divine intervention, and shoots him in the face, killing him. One month later Maxine is back at work on The Puritan II, hoping her success never ends.
Cast
- Mia Goth as Maxine Minx, with Charley Rowan McCain as young Maxine
- Elizabeth Debicki as Elizabeth Bender, the British director of The Puritan II
- Moses Sumney as Leon, video-store clerk and Maxine’s close friend
- Michelle Monaghan as Detective Williams
- Bobby Cannavale as Detective Torres
- Halsey as Tabby Martin
- Lily Collins as Molly Bennett
- Giancarlo Esposito as Teddy Knight, Maxine’s agent
- Kevin Bacon as John Labat, private investigator
- Simon Prast as Ernest Miller
- Chloe Farnworth as Amber James
- Uli Latukefu as Shepard Turei
- Deborah Geffner as Elaine, the casting director
- Sophie Thatcher as an FX artist (cameo)
- Larry Fessenden as a security guard
- Toby Huss as a coroner
- Ned Vaughn as the news anchor
Production
West said in March 2022 that he was writing a third film set after X, exploring another horror subgenre and cinema’s influence on society, with the three films designed to complement each other while standing alone. MaXXXine was officially announced in September 2022, at the Toronto International Film Festival’s Midnight Madness premiere of Pearl, with a teaser played after the credits and released online on September 13, 2022. A24 fast-tracked it off the success of the first two films. The teaser was set to Animotion’s “Obsession” (1984).
West’s earlier draft had a different ending, a supernatural haunting tied to Pearl. He cut it, saying it felt like “going backward.” Goth said in January 2023 that the script was finished and, in her opinion, the best of the series.
The ensemble was announced in April 2023, and principal photography ran for seven weeks in April and May 2023 in Los Angeles. The film was in late editing by February 2024.
Tyler Bates, who scored all three films, built this score around synthesisers, manipulated vocals and saxophone, and A24 Music released the soundtrack album alongside the film on July 5, 2024. The period needle-drops include ZZ Top’s “Gimme All Your Lovin’,” the Mary Jane Girls’ “In My House,” Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Welcome to the Pleasuredome,” Animotion’s “Obsession,” John Parr’s “St. Elmo’s Fire (Man in Motion)” and Kim Carnes’ “Bette Davis Eyes.”
The trilogy
X (2022) is set in 1979 Texas, where a young adult-film crew rents a farmhouse from an elderly couple, Howard and Pearl. Goth plays both Maxine and the elderly Pearl, under prosthetics, and Maxine is the sole survivor. Pearl (2022) is a prequel set in 1918, co-written by Goth, tracing the young Pearl’s unravelling on the same farm. MaXXXine is the direct sequel to X, set in 1985. Each film takes on its era’s horror: 1970s grindhouse slasher, curdled Technicolor melodrama, and 1980s Hollywood noir with a giallo edge.
The father was there from the start. The televangelist raging on the television at the end of X is Ernest Miller, preaching against the corruption of youth, so the reveal in MaXXXine is seeded in the first film’s own continuity.
Is it really the end? West mused between February and May 2024 about a possible fourth film, depending on reception. Then, in an August 2024 Reddit AMA, he said he was “happy with where [he] left it” and that MaXXXine is the end of the series. There is no announced fourth film.
Release and box office
MaXXXine had its world premiere on June 24, 2024, at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles. A24 hired “protesters” to stand outside with signs reading “Horror is not art” and “Hollywood is Satan’s playground,” turning the film’s Satanic-panic antagonists into its own ballyhoo. The film opened wide in the United States on July 5, 2024, rated R for strong violence, gore, sexual content, graphic nudity, language and drug use, and reached video on demand on August 2, 2024.
It opened with $6,705,038 from 2,450 theatres, finishing fourth for the weekend, and went on to gross $15,097,632 in the United States and Canada and $6,959,528 elsewhere, for $22,057,160 worldwide. That makes it the highest-grossing film of the trilogy. No official budget has been published; trade coverage describes the film as made for under $10 million.
Reception
On Rotten Tomatoes, 73 percent of 295 critics gave it a positive review, with an average rating of 6.5 out of 10, and the site’s consensus reads: “Intoxicating with its maxxximal style, MaXXXine is an uneven but vibrant pastiche that drives a stiletto through Hollywood’s heart.” Metacritic scored it 64 out of 100 from 50 critics, indicating generally favourable reviews. Variety described reviews leaning positive, while Uproxx called them mixed.
Audiences were warmer than they had been for Pearl: CinemaScore polling gave it a B, up from Pearl’s B minus, and PostTrak found 76 percent positive, with 59 percent saying they would definitely recommend it.
It was nominated for the Saturn Award for Best Independent Film, awarded on February 2, 2025, and did not win, and it received a Make-Up Artists and Hair Stylists Guild nomination for its period and character makeup.
Why it matters
MaXXXine closes one of the defining horror cycles of the 2020s: an original, director-driven trilogy built film by film rather than franchised by a studio. Three films in under three years, one performer playing both final girl and monster across them, and each film a different decade and subgenre. That is the Goth and West partnership in a sentence, and this is its Hollywood-facing capstone.
It is also the only film of the three in which Goth plays only the survivor, against a killer who made her. The mantra her father drilled into her, “I will not accept a life I do not deserve,” is the trilogy’s whole argument: the father’s curse and the daughter’s ambition are the same words. And the climax at the Hollywood sign stages fame and damnation on the same hillside, her father’s exorcism by camera and her own imagined premiere.
Trivia
- The killer’s calling card is a police-evidence VHS of the film-within-the-film from X: home video, the trilogy’s third technological era, turned into the threat itself.
- Maxine’s surname in the trilogy is Minx. Some cast listings render her as Maxine Miller, her father’s surname and her birth name.