Five Nights At Freddy's Falls Hard At The Box Office With 76% Drop In Second Weekend
Update 11/05/23: While Friday's box office numbers had "Five Nights at Freddy's" tracking for a 78% drop, Saturday ticket sales indicate a slightly less steep drop of 76%. The article has been updated accordingly.
It's no surprise that Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria struggled with repeat customers, especially after the Bite of '87. It's also no surprise that "Five Nights at Freddy's," the movie adaptation of the original horror game by Scott Cawthon, has dropped sharply in its second weekend at the box office, despite a lack of fresh competition. ("Dune: Part Two" was supposed to release this weekend, but has been delayed to 2024 due to the ongoing actors strike.)
Box Office Pro reports that "Five Nights at Freddy's" is on track to gross $19.4 million this weekend, a drop of 76% from its monstrous $80 million opening last week — which was the third-biggest debut for a horror movie of all time, behind only "It" and "It: Chapter Two." As huge as this drop is (50-60% is more typical for a second weekend), it's neither a great shock nor something that the studio is likely to worry about. In fact, NBCUniversal almost certainly anticipated this when the decision was made to give "Five Nights at Freddy's" a day-and-date release on its struggling streaming service, Peacock. There was a trade-off here: the movie's box office potential was sacrificed in a bid to bring in fresh streaming subscribers ahead of the end of the financial year.
Even with that trade-off, Freddy Fazbear will be singing a cheerful song. With a $131 million global start and modest $25 million production budget, the movie broke even in its opening weekend and will turn a healthy profit even with this drop. "Five Nights at Freddy's" was extremely front-loaded due to the massive existing fandom for the games and books, with fan events giving a boost to the opening weekend box office rush.
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So, yes, "Five Nights at Freddy's" is still a box office hit and there's no question that we'll be getting at least one sequel. With nine games in the main series and four more spin-offs, not to mention all the books, the "Five Nights at Freddy's" movie franchise has no shortage of source material to work with. It looks like Blumhouse Productions, the studio behind the "Paranormal Activity," "Insidious," and "The Purge" franchises, has added another lucrative horror universe to its arsenal.
Still, there's no doubt that "Five Nights at Freddy's" could have gone much further at the box office if NBCUniversal hadn't made the decision to release it on Peacock the same day it hit theaters. By extension, that means that a HD version of the film (as opposed to a wobbly bootleg shot on a hidden camera, with a nearby member of the audience sniffing loudly during tense moments) was also made available on pirate websites worldwide. Plenty of casual "Five Nights at Freddy's" fans who didn't catch the movie on opening weekend, as well as superfans looking for a repeat viewing, would have been in theaters this weekend if they hadn't been given the option to watch the movie at home instead. Blumhouse's other 2023 killer-robots movie, "M3GAN," dropped just 41% at the box office in its second weekend.
Peacock has made some market share gains this year, and "Five Nights at Freddy's" became the most-watched Peacock title of all time within five days of its release. But 2023's box office boom indicates that pandemic-era reports of cinema's death were greatly exaggerated. And now that the initial heat of the streaming wars has died down, studios have been struggling to make streaming financially viable. Making sacrifices on the theatrical side for the sake of streaming is a strategy that's about two years past its sell-by date, and starting to stink.