Blumhouse's Five Nights At Freddy's gambit paid off

Five Nights At Freddy’s made a frightfully good showing at last weekend’s box office, pulling in $78 million—enough to unseat both Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour and Killers Of The Flower Moon. This massive (and somewhat unexpected) success was enough to log the spooky video game adaptation in the history books as not just the highest-grossing opening weekend in producing studio Blumhouse’s history, but also the highest-grossing film in the history of Halloween weekends ever. This feat is especially impressive considering the team behind it knew they might be alienating non-game-players from the start.

“Hollywood often makes this mistake while adapting a popular book or game. They want to satisfy old-timers and a new audience, and there’s always that pressure,” Blumhouse founder Jason Blum said of the film’s genesis at his New York Comic Con panel earlier this month, joking that “Universal really won’t like that I’m saying this.” (We’re sure any trouble he might have found himself in evaporated the second the box office opened.)

While the original 2014 game achieved rapid cult success, Blum said the movie took eight years to get right. The key, according to him, came from director Emma Tammi. “What became clear while developing this is to do it for true fans. If new people get introduced to it in the process, that’s fine,” he said. “What Emma did so well and what we figured out is that we need to make a movie for fans and not try to please everyone.”

Those fans responded in kind. Attention to detail obviously isn’t the only reason audiences flocked to the theater (despite a concurrent Peacock release) this past weekend. The film’s PG-13 rating definitely served to widen its appeal and the fact that this was the only spooky movie opening on this year’s Halloweekend didn’t hurt.

But there’s something to be said for creating a piece of art specifically for a pre-existing and very passionate fanbase. That strategy worked immensely for HBO’s The Last Of Us, which found a way to remain accessible to video game newbies while still containing an incredible amount of detail for longtime fans of the franchise. We’ll see if it continues to pay off in future video game adaptations, or grand fandom redos like Percy Jackson And The Olympians.