Box office: It's back to the doldrums as Five Nights plummets and there are no new (or old!) studio films to pick up the slack

Usually, the weekend after Halloween marks the start of the lucrative winter holiday season. This year... not so much.

The lights are down so low that the only thing harder to see than these Five Nights at Freddy’s animatronics is the weekend’s box-office figures.

The weekend after Halloween used to be a reliable launch pad for the winter holiday season.

In the 2010s, this weekend almost always saw the release of at least one brand new hit, and sometimes two—witness the one-two punches of Big Hero 6 and Interstellar in 2014, SPECTRE and The Peanuts Movie in 2015, or Doctor Strange and Trolls in 2016. In 2018, this was the weekend Bohemian Rhapsody began its long, steady march to Oscar glory and becoming, for a few years, the top-grossing biopic of all time.

But since Covid began? The weekend after Halloween has been virtually ignored.

Disney did release Eternals on this weekend in 2021, but that turned out to be the first in a long and growing string of box-office disappointments for Marvel.

And now… in 2023… theatres were basically left to bide their time, hoping that maybe next weekend or the weekend after that will be better, while in the meantime they had to make do with no new major studio movies, plummeting holdovers, and a smattering of smaller releases that didn’t make much of a dent at the box office.

It wasn’t always going to be this way.

Until ten weeks ago, this was the weekend Dune: Part Two was going to come out. The original film opened to $41 million in October 2021—a more than decent amount, considering the pandemic and the fact that the film was also available on HBO Max—and it stood to reason that the sequel would have had an even bigger opening.

But alas, it was not to be. The actors’ union went on strike in July and, by the end of the summer, the studio had decided to delay Dune: Part Two until March.

No new studio films came along to fill the gap, and so theatres were left with a variety of indie films and leftover October releases—the biggest of which, Five Nights at Freddy’s, dropped an unusually steep 75.8% from its opening last week.

The result: all movies combined grossed only $62.9 million, making this the 4th-worst weekend of the year, behind two weekends in September and one in February.

Notably, one could argue that only two of this week’s top ten movies were produced and distributed by the legacy studios:

• Five Nights at Freddy’s and The Exorcist: Believer were made by Universal.

• Killers of the Flower Moon and Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie were both distributed by Paramount, at least in the US, but Killers was produced by Apple TV+ and Paw Patrol was produced by Spin Master, a Canadian toy company (and the latter film was distributed in Canada by Elevation, a Canadian distributor).

• Taylor Swift distributed The Eras Tour through a major theatre chain, without any studio involvement.

• Priscilla, Radical, After Death, What Happens Later, and Freelance were distributed by A24, Pantelion, Angel, Bleecker Street, and Relativity, respectively.

Exhibitors can only hope that things will get better next week, when Disney has another Marvel movie coming out—said film being The Marvels, a sort of four-in-one sequel to Captain Marvel, WandaVision, Ms Marvel, and Secret Invasion—but the box-office forecast for that film isn’t looking very good right now, either.¹

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