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

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.

It doesn’t hurt that actual new movies didn’t make much of an impact in theaters this weekend, either, with neither Meg Ryan’s What Happens Next or Daisy Ridley’s The Marsh King’s Daughter cracking the top five films of the weekend. Marsh King, which had a limited release, brought in less than $1 million, averaging out to a little less than $800 per screen.

The other winners, then, were old favorites: Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour came in second, at $13.5 million, ahead of Scorsese’s Killers Of The Flower Moon at $7 million even. Priscilla and Radical brought up the rear, with Sofia Coppola’s biopic bringing in $5.1 in domestic markets over the weekend.