Box Office Report: Mambo Number Five

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | October 30, 2023 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | October 30, 2023 |

If you were in the mood for a horror film at the cinema this past weekend, you really only had one big option. Five Nights at Freddy’s, adapted from the wildly popular video game franchise, would have done well even if the competition had been fiercer. After all, those games are inexplicably huge online, especially with younger audiences who needed an adult to take them to the movies to see it. Still, it didn’t hurt being the only true scary movie with a wide release in theatres the weekend before Halloween.

The film made a very healthy $78 million from 3,675 locations. That’s especially impressive given that it debuted simultaneously on Peacock. That domestic gross is the third-biggest horror opening of all time behind It and its sequel, and it’s also the highest-grossing horror debut for a movie directed by a woman, Emma Tammi (check out her film The Wind if you have the time.) Jump scares sell.

At number four is some weird Christian film called After Death, released by the same company that forced Sound of Freedom onto us. This, uh, movie is apparently based on real near-death experiences and encounters with the afterlife. Uh huh, okay. Anyway, it made $5,060,815 from 2,645 theatres. Sure, whatever.

Debuting at number seven is John Cena’s action movie Freelance, which seemed to slide into cinemas with very little promotion (even by strike standards), and the gross shows that. Only $2.06 million from 2,057 theatres.

In limited release news, the Oscar players are creeping into the conversation. Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers, starring Paul Giamatti, landed at number 14 with $200,000 from six theatres. Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla debuted at number 17 with $132,139 from only four cinemas. Their per-screen averages were both around $33,000. Expect both films to stick around in the discourse for a few months.

The Tunisian drama Four Daughters, about a woman whose children become politically radicalised, made $5,398 from one theatre; the documentary Holy Frit grossed $2,011 from one location.

This coming week sees the wide expansion of Priscilla, the release of the drama The Marsh King’s Daughter, and Titanic: The Musical, a real thing that I can testify to its existence because I saw it on stage in June!

You can check out the rest of the weekend box office here.