Five Nights at Freddy’s Movie Already Made Back Its Budget

As of 6 October, the Five Nights at Freddy's Movie has already made back its budget and then some, without even counting a single box office ticket. In a Fortune interview, Jason Blum, producer at Blumhouse Studios, revealed that the movie managed to make back what the studio spent on it before a single person has seen the movie in theaters through selling the streaming rights to Peacock, as well as selling theatrical distribution rights.

The FNAF Movie's budget was a whopping $25 million, much of which was spent commissioning extremely realistic animatronics from Jim Henson's Creature Shop. Jim Henson's Creature Shop has previously created animatronics for other major productions, such as Sesame Street and Fraggle Rock: Back To The Rock. There is no CGI used for the animatronics in the film, though they definitely could've fooled me; looking at the quality of the animatronic models in the film's trailers and posters, it's clear that the budget was well-spent.

While Blumhouse's $25 million budget doesn't hold a candle to some big-ticket production budgets like Marvel, DC, or Disney, it's quite a lot for a horror title these days. By comparison, Willy's Wonderland, another animatronic horror film drawing on the themes in FNAF but not related to the series, only had a $5 million budget. Still, FNAF has a large enough following to make this title work and could be Blumhouse's biggest money-maker yet. To get fans even more excited, the studio created a real-life FNAF phone number that fans can text.

The Five Nights at Freddy's franchise has certainly come a long way since the first game; during the first title's development, indie developer Scott Cawthorn started a $10,000 Kickstarter and raised no money, instead having to fund the first FNAF game himself. In 2023, his game has multiple sequels, including FNAF 2, FNAF 3, FNAF: Help Wanted in VR, and the upcoming big-screen adaptation that is projected to bring in almost triple its budget.