“Five Nights at Freddy’s” scared up $80 million at the domestic box office in its first weekend of release, above Sunday’s already-huge estimate of $78 million.
Universal and Blumhouse released the film, which landed simultaneously on Peacock. With Monday’s final figures, “Five Nights” has tied Disney’s 2021 Marvel adventure “Black Widow” ($80 million in theaters and $60 million on Disney+) as the biggest opening weekend for a day-and-date streaming release.
Though Disney reported the initial digital sales for “Black Widow,” which cost an extra $30 to rent on top of the monthly subscription fee, NBCUniversal didn’t share any tangible streaming metrics for “Five Nights.” However, the company claimed that “Five Nights at Freddy’s” has been the most-watched and biggest subscription driver on Peacock (which has far fewer subscribers than Disney+) since it dropped on Oct. 26. “Five Nights” is available at no extra charge to monthly subscribers.
Even with Sunday’s estimates, “Five Nights at Freddy’s” already ranked as the best ever for Universal and Peacock’s hybrid releases, beating the slasher sequels, 2021’s “Halloween Kills” ($49 million) and 2022’s “Halloween Ends” ($40 million). And those were follow-up films in a time-tested film franchise.
“Five Nights at Freddy’s” is based on the popular video game and follows Josh Hutcherson as a nighttime security guard at a family entertainment center called Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. But he finds out the hard way that it’s not exactly Chuck E. Cheese because, well, these animatronic mascots are prone to murder. Reviews were terrible (it has a 25% on Rotten Tomatoes), but that doesn’t matter because it’s been resonating with audiences, who awarded it an “A-” CinemaScore.With its $20 million production budget, the movie is already a huge commercial winner.
“The IP is ridiculously popular, and Blumhouse and our director Emma Tammi did an amazing job of translating that to the big screen,” says Universal’s president of domestic distribution Jim Orr. “The genre lends itself to people wanting to experience it together.”
Some box office analysts believe a hybrid release leaves money on the table. “The premium experience of watching a horror film is sitting shoulder-to-shoulder in a dark room, jumping, gasping and laughing with a roomful of strangers,” says David A. Gross, who runs the movie consulting firm Franchise Entertainment Research.“The audience that watches it at home this weekend will not get that experience, and their ticket sale will be lost.”
With “Five Nights at Freddy’s,” it didn’t appear to stop too many fans from buying tickets. The film added another $52 million at the international box office for a scary-good global start of $132 million. Among its many early box office records, it also stands as the highest-grossing opening weekend for Blumhouse, surpassing 2018’s “Halloween” ($76.22 million) as well as the second-largest debut of all time for a video game adaptation, behind “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” ($146.3 million).
