After earning $98.5 million with his 2015 thriller “The Visit,” director M. Night Shyamalan returns with personalities to the big screen in “Split.”

The film scored $40 million after its first week in theaters and is only down 34 percent in its second week, earning $26 million. According to vulture.com, horror and thriller movies usually drop by up to 60 percent in their second weeks, but “Split” has kept audiences intrigued.

The thriller focuses on Kevin (James McAvoy), a middle-aged man who has multiple personalities, and one of them likes to kidnap teenage girls.

In the beginning of the film, Kevin, under his dominant personality Dennis, kidnaps three girls from a birthday party and keeps them in his bunker-esque home. Dennis, who suffers from extreme OCD, is just one of Kevin’s 23 different personalities; others are history-obsessed, 9-years-old or even female.

One of the girls, Casey, is calm and attentive to her kidnapper and is strategically friendly to Kevin’s personalities. Her backstory is revealed in short flashbacks to her troubled childhood, and viewers are exposed to from where she gets her crucial survival skills.

But as Casey and the other girls try to escape and Kevin continues to personality-shift, the plot slowly reveals itself. Kevin often sees his therapist Dr. Fletcher in fits of panic, as his personalities fight for time in the spotlight. During these meetings, the concerned Dr. Fletcher eventually urges Kevin and the others to reveal that a new 24th personality is not human.

With 24 personalities in one character, McAvoy beautifully portrays each of the eight shown on-screen. At the first transition between personalities, I wasn’t sold. But as the plot accelerated, McAvoy was able to differentiate each personality so clearly, I was convinced they could have been different people.

Even though he was running on a low budget for the film, Shyamalan still stayed true to his plot-twister reputation. After proving his skill with “The Sixth Sense” and “Unbreakable” in 1999 and 2000, respectively, Shyamalan had only one successful box-office break in the next decade with “The Last Airbender” in 2010.

But 2015’s “The Visit” brought his name back into the spotlight and a chance for Shyamalan to execute the idea he has had for almost two decades in 2017.

“Split” ends as Kevin’s 24th non-human personality is loose and has been given the name “The Horde,” which reminds a woman in a diner of “a funny guy in a wheelchair,” prompting her to ask, “what was his name?”

The scene shifts to a cameo of Bruce Willis in a work uniform with a nametag that read “Dunn,” replying, “Mr. Glass.” Dunn is the name of Willis’s superhero character in Shyamalan’s “Unbreakable,” and Mr. Glass is Samuel L. Jackson’s supervillain character in the same movie.

Shyamalan told audiences at the Los Angeles premiere of “Split” that McAvoy’s character was originally part of the “Unbreakable” script, but he ended up taking it out.

“People have approached me about continuing the story,” Shyamalan said at the time of the “Unbreakable” release, “but the idea of doing a traditional sequel doesn’t inspire me. It has to be organic and has to come from the right place — otherwise, it’ll smell of artificiality. But it’s fascinating how much it’s stuck around. I do think about it a lot.”

As someone who never saw “Unbreakable,” I was completely confused with the ending but still impressed with Shyamalan’s ingenuity. Seventeen years after the release of “Unbreakable,” Shyamalan has returned to the supervillain thriller in a surprising sequel that compels fans talk about a possible third film based on Kevin’s 24th personality.

“…I do have an idea (about a third film),” Shyamalan said to Birth.Movies.Death, “and I’m kind of excited about it. So I can’t say 100 percent yet. I might be able to soon, and it’ll turn into a promise then, but it’s not a promise yet.”