Five Nights At Freddy's Sets A Halloween Box Office Record With $80 Million Opening Weekend
Update: With the weekend box office totals in, "Five Nights at Freddy's" landed a better-than-expected $80 million debut. The headline has been updated to reflect this. Original article follows.
"Five Nights at Freddy's" started its life as a simple but terrifyingly effective indie game in which the player must survive the night shift (five night shifts, to be precise) in a family restaurant where the animatronics get restless after the sun goes down. Now, the movie adaptation from director Emma Tammi has set a new record for the Halloween weekend box office, and will likely supplant 2018's "Halloween" to be crowned as Blumhouse Productions' biggest ever debut.
Existing fans of the games excitedly gathered for Thursday night previews, propelling the movie to $10.3 million at the domestic box office before it had even got to its official opening day. By the end of Friday it had already grossed $39.5 million, a number that most horror movies would be delighted to hit in an entire opening weekend.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, "Five Nights at Freddy's" is now heading for a Thursday-to-Sunday total of $78 million, which would be the third biggest opening for a horror movie ever, behind "It" ($123.4 million) and "It: Chapter Two" ($91 million), and just ahead of "Halloween" ($76.2 million). It has already surged past "Puss in Boots" ($34 million) as the top-grossing debut for a Halloween weekend. Overseas, it's on track to gross $52 million from 60 markets this week, bringing its global start to a total of $130 million.
What's even more impressive is that "Five Nights at Freddy's" has managed this despite simultaneously releasing on Peacock, NBCUniversal's streaming service. Day-and-date releases, which were popularized during the pandemic, have these days become a signal that the studio lacks confidence in a movie's box office potential. In this case, however, the opposite is probably true. NBCUniversal may have been so confident in the demand for "Five Nights at Freddy's" that the movie was seen as an opportunity to boost Peacock subscriptions while still doing comfortably well at the box office.
How do you do, fellow kids?
With younger people being more inclined to go out to the movies than older people, the 18-24 and 25-39 demographics are highly coveted target audiences for studios. But what are the kids into these days? Not Indiana Jones movies, apparently.
This is Blumhouse's second hit horror movie of 2023 to focus on homicidal robots (hi, "M3GAN.") What has really driven "Five Nights at Freddy's" to such great heights, however, is the built-in fanbase. The original game was perfect fodder for the YouTube Let's Plays and reaction videos that many Zoomers and younger Millennials watch more voraciously than traditional TV shows. Part 1 of a "Five Nights at Freddy's" playthrough by popular YouTuber Markiplier, uploaded nine years ago, has 114 million views. The initial success spawned a media franchise that now includes 13 games, dozens of books and graphic novels, 81 Funko POPs — and, of course, a movie.
Nonetheless, producer Jason Blum told IGN that people mocked him for trying to make a "Five Nights at Freddy's" film. "Everyone said we could never get the movie done, including, by the way, internally in my company," Blum revealed. "I was made fun of for pursuing this."
Critics are underwhelmed, with "Five Nights at Freddy's" holding a rating of 26% on Rotten Tomatoes as of this writing. But with a relatively modest budget of $25 million, the movie has almost certainly broken even at the box office already. It looks like Blum will have the last laugh.