With Emma Tammi's Five Nights At Freddy's 2, Blumhouse Productions and Universal Pictures decided to take a different tactic than the one taken with the movie's 2023 predecessor. In releasing the first adaptation of the popular video game series, the studios decided to go with a day-and-date strategy, making it available for Peacock subscribers and theater-goers simultaneously, but the rough consequence of this call was a 76 percent post-premiere weekend-to-weekend drop. An attempt was made to avoid this fate for the sequel by giving it an exclusive release in cinemas... and sadly, the numbers show that it did not work out well at all.
After dominating the box office last weekend, Five Nights At Freddy's 2 now has to settle for second place, as Zootopia 2 has proven resurgent and has won its second box office crown since arriving in multiplexes late last month. Check out the full Top 10 below and join me after for analysis.
TITLE | WEEKEND GROSS | DOMESTIC GROSS | LW | THTRS |
|---|---|---|---|---|
1. Zootopia 2 | $26,300,000 | $258,970,004 | 2 | 3,835 |
2. Five Nights At Freddy’s 2 | $19,500,000 | $95,481,000 | 1 | 3,579 |
3. Wicked: For Good | $8,550,000 | $312,145,000 | 3 | 3,480 |
4. Now You See Me: Now You Don’t | $2,380,000 | $59,340,400 | 5 | 2,411 |
5. Jujutsu Kaisen: Execution | $2,102,000 | $14,513,720 | 4 | 1,900 |
6. Ella McCay* | $2,100,000 | $2,100,000 | N/A | 2,500 |
7. How The Grinch Stole Christmas | $1,850,000 | $264,276,000 | N/A | 2,250 |
8. Eternity | $1,774,328 | $12,998,616 | 7 | 2,067 |
9. Hamnet | $1,490,000 | $7,004,510 | 8 | 749 |
10. Silent Night, Deadly Night* | $1,120,000 | $1,120,000 | N/A | 1,640 |
Zootopia 2 Continues To Be A Massive Hit And Becomes The Second Biggest Worldwide Hit Of 2025
This has been a bit of an odd year at the box office for Walt Disney Studios – perfectly evidenced by the fact that we are now in the middle of December and none of the movies in the worldwide Top 10 for the year are Marvel Studios productions. That's a pretty shocking development – but there are still some wins to celebrate this year, with Jared Bush and Byron Howard's Zootopia 2 being the latest.
After a one week break from the top of the weekend box office domestically, the animated sequel is now back on top, having added $26.3 million more to its earnings in the United States and Canada (per The Numbers). Its resurgence isn't expected to be terribly long-lived thanks to the competition on the way (more on that later), but the long-awaited feature is making the most of its time as the most popular film currently playing on the big screen around the world.
To date, Zootopia 2 has made $259 million domestically, which makes it the ninth biggest film in the market to come out in 2025 – though it is obviously still climbing. Dean DeBlois' live-action remake of How To Train Your Dragon is the title presently sitting in front of it, the Dreamworks title having made $263 million during its entire theatrical run, and earning another $100 million would see it climb into the Top 5 for the year (behind the $339.6 million made by Gareth Edwards' Jurassic World: Rebirth).
Notably, the 2025 movie also continues to outpace the earnings of its 2016 predecessor. By the time that Byron Howard Rich Moore's Zootopia hit its nineteenth day in theaters, it had made $209.3 million domestically, and the sequel is way ahead of that. It's admittedly not an apples-to-apples comparison, as the original had a March release instead of coming out in November, but it remains a good sign for Zootopia 2 given that the original completed its big screen run in the U.S. and Canada making $341.3 million.
The picture only looks rosier for Zootopia 2 when looking at the business it is doing worldwide: less than a quarter of the earnings have actually come from the domestic market. To date, the Disney animated feature has made $877.7 million from foreign territories, which brings its global total up to $1.14 billion. That means that it has now successfully outgrossed Dean Fleischer Camp's Lilo & Stitch (which made $1.04 billion during its time on the big screen this summer).
So far, only one 2025 film has made more money in cinemas this year than Zootopia 2, and that's Jiaozi's Ne Zha 2 – which made over $2 billion (almost all of it in China).
Coming up, of course, is some major competition for the Walt Disney Animation Studios movie... though it is also a bit of a robbing Peter to pay Paul situation: James Cameron's Avatar: Fire And Ash, also a Disney release, is expected to steal attention worldwide when it arrives in theaters this Friday. How will Zootopia 2 fare in co-existence? That will be a question worth examining closely in the weeks ahead.
Five Nights At Freddy's 2 Suffers A Rough Fall As Bad Buzz Takes Its Toll
Now, let's take a look at the rough weekend experienced by Five Nights At Freddy's 2.
When Emma Tammi's Five Nights At Freddy's struggled during its second weekend in theaters back in 2023, a majority of the blame was put on the aforementioned day-and-date release. The thinking was pretty straight forward: die-hard fans of the video game were excited to see the movie on the big screen when it first opened, but anyone else even mildly curious about the title didn't feel compelled to leave their homes to see it when it was available with a few clicks of the TV remote.
Shot callers at Blumhouse and Universal Pictures probably thought that they fixed this problem with an exclusive theatrical window for Five Nights At Freddy's 2, but they overlooked a vital part of the filmmaking equation: they didn't develop a feature that everyday movie-goers would be excited to see. The sequel was always going to be seen as critic-proof in its debut, as fans were going to flock to it regardless of word-of-mouth, but the second weekend is a different landscape: folks on the fence about going to see it had to be convinced, and zero favors were offered by the critical drubbing that FNAF2 received.
The end result of this? A $64 million debut domestically has been followed by a $19.5 million haul in its sophomore weekend – which calculates to a devastating 70 percent collapse. At the end of the day, the movie is still going to be considered a financial success, as Five Nights At Freddy's 2 has made $95.5 million domestically and $173.8 million on a reported $36 million budget (via Variety), but how long can a franchise subsist on what amounts to flash-in-the-pan success?
Looking ahead, all eyes are going to be on Avatar: Fire And Ash this coming weekend, which is obviously expected to debut at #1 domestically – but how much will it make, how will those numbers compare to its franchise predecessors, and how will the title's arrival affect the rest of the Top 10? Be sure to head back here to CinemaBlend next Sunday for my next box office column in which I will break it all down!
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