Five Nights At Freddy's "wins" the box office again

The video game adaptation had a massive drop-off after its huge opening weekend, but still beat out Taylor Swift and Martin Scorsese

By William Hughes | November 5, 2023 | 7:54pm

Aux News Five Nights at Freddy's

Five Nights At Freddy’s Screenshot: YouTube

Blumhouse’s Five Nights At Freddy’s adaptation has triumphed at the box office for the second week in a row—albeit for a definition of “triumph” that has a whiff of the ol’ Pyrrhic victory to it. Variety reports that the PG-13 horror flick suffered a pretty tremendous 76 percent drop in box office returns from its first week in theaters to its second, bringing in just $19.4 million this weekend. Some critics have pointed to the film’s simultaneous streaming release on the paid tiers of Peacock as a big factor in the fall, after diehard fans swarmed the theaters to see the movie together last week.

Of course, there’s another way to look at that big dip—which was large even by the standards of second-week box-office falls, which can be fairly precipitous after opening weekend. Which is to say that Freddy’s only had so far to drop because it pretty much demolished expectations during its first week in theaters, bringing in more than $90 million over the Halloween weekend. And it’s not like $19.4 million is anything to sneeze at in any case, especially for a horror film that was made with a mere $20 million budget.