Five Nights At Freddy's Is Already Profitable – And It Hasn't Even Opened Yet
Nobody is playing the Hollywood game like Blumhouse these days. Where the major studios are busy breaking the bank trying to score a win, Jason Blum's production hub has embraced an incredibly cost-efficient model, churning out several low-budget horror films or thrillers within the span of a single year. With box office hits "M3GAN" and "Insidious: The Red Door" already under its belt in 2023, Blumhouse is gearing up for its biggest release of the year with "Five Nights at Freddy's," a film adaptation of the indie point-and-click survival horror game turned lucrative media franchise that's been terrorizing Gen-Zers since 2014. If all goes to plan, the movie could end up being the start of a new trilogy, ensuring that Freddy Fazbear and his fellow animatronic mascots will continue to stalk their victims in live-action for years to come.
Those who haven't already might want to go ahead and start boning up on your "Five Nights at Freddy's" lore now. In an interview with Fortune (via Total Film), Blum revealed the movie is already in the black thanks to its streaming and theatrical distribution sales alone. This can be attributed to the film's modest budget, which has yet to be officially revealed but is speculated to be in the range of $20-25 million. If accurate, that would actually be a pretty high figure for a Blumhouse production, most of which tend to top out at $20 million (as was the case with M. Night Shyamalan's "Glass" and David Gordon Green's "Halloween" sequels). Not only that, the most expensive Blumhouse film of all time, with a mid-level budget of $48 million, is, uh, "Tooth Fairy." As in the 2010 comedy where Dwayne Johnson gets turned into the tooth fairy. What a world, eh?
Low risks, high returns
Blumhouse's penny-pinching approach has served it well these last 15 years, going back to its breakout success with the original "Paranormal Activity" in the late aughts. By keeping its costs to a minimum, the studio has been able to use surprise hits like "Insidious" and "The Purge" as launchpads for horror franchises that are still going strong to this day. Because they're less commercially risky, Blumhouse productions also allow for much more creative freedom, paving the way for filmmakers like Jordan Peele, Leigh Whannell, and Spike Lee to come in and deliver the type of bold, provocative storytelling that they wouldn't have had the opportunity to make elsewhere. And in addition to being pretty damn good, many of these films end up turning a tidy profit. Who'd have thunk?
Speaking to Fortune, Blum shed light on some of the ways his company keeps its expenses down, like limiting both the acting roles and the number of extras who talk in any individual film. "Waiters don't speak in our movies," he explained, lest they have to be paid an additional $800 per industry regulations. It's another reason why "Five Nights at Freddy's" makes perfect sense for Blumhouse. Most of the story focuses on a security guard (Josh Hutcherson) who's tasked with watching over the dilapidated Freddy Fazbear's Pizza family entertainment center alone at night, unaware that its animatronic mascots like to silently come alive and murder people after the sun goes down. For that matter, this may explain why most of the monsters in Blumhouse's wheelhouse aren't the chatty types (à la more talkative boogeymen like Freddy Krueger).
"Five Nights at Freddy's" premieres in theaters and on Peacock on October 27, 2023.