Box office: Five Nights at Freddy's gets the fans out of their houses for Halloween

Far surpassing expectations, it had one of the best openings ever of any horror movie, any video-game movie, any October release, any day-and-date release, and any film directed by a woman.

Security guard Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson) is pursued by possessed animatronics in Five Nights at Freddy’s.

In a year full of unpredictable box-office twists and turns, this weekend’s was a doozy: Five Nights at Freddy’s, a low-budget horror film based on a video game, came out of nowhere and grossed a whopping $78 million to become one of the year’s biggest hits, breaking records and defying all sorts of conventional wisdom along the way.

The film’s first-weekend performance was startling for a number of reasons:

• As recently as twelve days ago, box-office experts were saying that this film might open to $40 million—and that was considered impressive enough, given the film’s $20 million budget, its relative obscurity, and the fact that no other scripted film had had an opening that big since the ‘Barbenheimer’ duo back in July.

  • As it is, Five Nights at Freddy’s made almost $40 million on Friday alone, and it opened to nearly double that figure over the weekend.

• Everyone assumed the film’s box-office performance would be undermined by the fact that it was getting a day-and-date release on the Peacock streaming service.

  • As it is, Five Nights at Freddy’s soared past the previous top gross for a film that got a simultaneous release on Peacock—Halloween Kills, 2021, $49.4 million—and it nearly tied the $80.4 million that Black Widow opened to when it was released on Disney+ the same day it opened in theatres, also in 2021.

• Two months ago, when Dune: Part Two—which was going to open November 3—got bumped to next year because of the actors’ strike, it was not uncommon to hear people say that theatres were counting on The Exorcist: Believer to be the one hit movie that would keep them going this season. Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour hadn’t even been announced yet at that point, and Five Nights at Freddy’s was an obscure (to the mainstream) title on a less-than-auspicious weekend.¹

  • As it is, The Exorcist was a complete and utter dud, but Taylor Swift and Five Nights at Freddy’s had two of the nine best openings of the year so far… so box-office salvation came from two completely unexpected sources.

The success of Five Nights at Freddy’s also embodied, in one film, a number of trends that have kept coming up these past few years:

• Movies based on video games (e.g. The Super Mario Bros Movie) are huge.

• Movies directed by women (e.g. Barbie) are huge.

  • Five Nights at Freddy’s may be even more remarkable as it is one of the few major non-children’s movies directed by a woman to have a male protagonist and to play to a majority male audience (57% male, in this case).

• Non-sequels produced by Universal (e.g. Oppenheimer) are huge.

• Horror movies (e.g. Smile, The Nun II, Insidious: The Last Key, etc.) are huge.

• Low-budget movies (e.g. Sound of Freedom) are huge.

Obviously, not every movie that falls into one of those categories is huge; there are lots of low-budget movies that flop, and lots of horror movies that flop, etc. But it’s still striking to see how all those trends have converged on a single movie now.

In any case, the question now is what kind of “legs” this movie will have.

• Movies that appeal to hardcore fans tend to be front-loaded, and presumably horror movies in general are prone to dropping sharply the week after Halloween.

• Then again, this film got an A- Cinemascore rating, which is virtually unheard of for a horror film. That suggests a lot of potential repeat business, etc.

As ever, we shall see.

Meanwhile, there are at least two other things worth noting about this week’s top ten:

• Angel Studios—the streaming service that went theatrical this year and had one of the summer’s biggest and most controversial hits with Sound of Freedom—landed in the top five again with a documentary about near-death experiences called After Death. The film grossed an estimated $5.1 million, which was good enough for 4th place and is one of the better openings for a documentary.

• Killers of the Flower Moon—the super-long period piece that marks Apple TV+’s first serious foray into theatrical distribution—grossed only $9 million in its second week and had the steepest percentage drop of any film directed by Martin Scorsese or starring Leonardo DiCaprio. This raises a few questions, e.g.:

  • Did this film play to hardcore Scorsese/DiCaprio fans—or fans of capital-C Cinema—the same way genre films play to their fans, with huge first-weekend turnouts followed by bigger drops than usual in the weeks that follow?

  • Was the film’s box-office performance undermined at all by the film’s Apple TV+ connection? (No date has been set for the streaming release yet.)

  • Was there something about the film itself that caused it to drop?

And now, a few more stats and facts re: this week’s top ten, title by title: