Horror producer Jason Blum has thanked cinemagoers for supporting Five Nights at Freddy’s following its record-breaking opening weekend.

In the adaptation of the video game of the same name, Josh Hutcherson plays a troubled security guard who must look after an abandoned pizza restaurant filled with murderous animatronic mascots.

Despite poor reviews and a simultaneous U.S. release on the streaming service Peacock, the horror surpassed expectations and took $78 million (£64 million) in North America and $130 million (£107 million) globally on its opening weekend, making it the biggest horror opening of the year worldwide.

It also achieved the highest-grossing opening weekend for Blum’s production company, Blumhouse, both domestic and globally, surpassing the takings of 2018’s Halloween.

Blum took to Twitter/X on Sunday to celebrate his latest movie’s success.

“It’s so fun when it works. Thank you all so much for being patient with us on #fnaf we wanted to get it just right for the fans,” he wrote. “That’s all we were focused on. We appreciate you. Thank you for the amazing week end (sic).”

He added in a later post, “And it’s official. We did something else. Biggest Blumhouse opening movie of all time. Thank you again #FNAF fans.”

In an interview with Variety, the film’s director, Emma Tammi, teased potential sequels to Five Nights at Freddy’s.

“We’ll see how things go this weekend. We’re definitely excited to keep making more movies in this world, should we be lucky enough to do that,” she said. “This one was tied into the first game, and we would probably focus on tying the second one into the second game, and so on and so forth. But anything could happen. We’ll have to see.”

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