Brace yourself, because Five Night’s at Freddy’s is about to set some records. It’s already the highest opening day for a video game movie ever, and it’s setting its sights on a $78 million opening weekend, easily the highest for any horror movie this year by a large amount. Longer term, we’ll have to see, but at a budget of $20 million, this is a runaway hit.
Anyone even remotely aware of youth video game culture may have predicted this, as the series has been a craze for years now among Gen Z and their idols like Markiplier and MatPat. Now, that coming to the big screen, and being at least somewhat satisfying for fans is making it a megahit. Critic scores are trash but audience reviews and its A- cinemascore are extremely high.
Since I knew this was going to be a big “moment,” I wanted to watch the movie myself, which I did with its co-release on Peacock yesterday, which clearly has not affected its box office. While I am obviously a big video game guy, I have absolutely zero connection with the game. I’ve never played it, and I just know that the youths are crazy about it. I know it’s about murderous, knock-off Chuck-E-Cheese robots, but that’s about it.
So, I’m trying to take it as just a pure horror movie which I thought was…actually pretty okay. I think what a lot of people are missing is that this is kind of “baby’s first horror movie” in a lot of ways, as condescending as that may sound. It’s PG-13 and it’s based on a Teen-rated game. I do think the movie would have been a better horror movie if it was more gory than it was (see Willy’s Wonderland for a similar concept with more gore plus Nicholas Cage), but I also understand why that decision was made based on the audience who would go see it. FNAF would not be anywhere near this scale of hit if an R-rating cut off 75% of the viewerbase, at minimum.
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