Five Night’s at Freddy’s sets records in its impressive debut
Numbers have begun rolling in for this last weekend before Halloween and with tracking lying somewhere between $50 million and $90 million for the video game adaptation of Five Nights at Freddy’s, the film is hitting its mark with a projected $78 million opening. That’s about $13 million more than we saw it on Thursday. The number is extremely impressive for several reasons, one of which is the fact this was a theatrical day and date release where the film was also available on the peacock streaming service.
That number puts this PG13 rated horror film in some good company as it becomes the second highest grossing opening for a video game movie (sandwiched between The Super Mario Bros. Movie’s $146.3 million and Sonic The Hedgehog’s (72 million)) while also becoming the highest grossing opening ever for Halloween weekend. While it also becomes Blumhouse’s 19th number 1 opener. Pretty solid for a company that rarely goes over $20 million on their budgets.
So why is this movie hitting it out of the park? As producer Jason Blum put it, they made this movie for the fans. Which is quite obvious when you look at the films critical reactions (26% on Rotten Tomatoes including a 4/10 from our own Tyler Nichols, who admitted he didn’t know much about the video game franchise prior to seeing the film) while audiences have given it a solid 89% audience score.
Taylor Swift falls to second place with an estimated weekend take of $16.5 million while Killers of the Flower Moon is looking to drop just 50% of its audience for a $10-$11 million second weekend. The faith based documentary After Death looks to have a solid debut with around $6 million in receipts.
What do you make of Five Nights at Freddy’s tremendous success? Let us know in the comments and don’t forget to check back with us tomorrow when we have a full rundown on this weekend’s box office numbers.