• by Wayne Friedman , December 7, 2025

Adding to much-needed, late-season gains for the movie theater business, Universal Pictures' "Five Nights at Freddy’s 2" scared up a $63 million domestic opening, according to IMDb’s Box Office Mojo -- a week after the Thanksgiving weekend.

This came with a very efficient national TV ad spend by Universal -- a very modest $4.64 million. This was from just 149 airings yielding 301.7 million impressions, according to estimates from EDO Ad EnGage, for its entire campaign so far.

This gave the movie a strong search engagement volume activity (EV) of 614, according to EDO -- which is the measure of increase in search engagement in the minutes after one “Five Nights” TV message aired.

Access to social-media campaign efforts -- the resulting engagement activity -- could not be determined by press time.

Walt Disney’s “Zootopia 2” landed in second place with $43 million for its third week in release -- now at $220.5 million domestically and $915.8 million globally.

The massive opening for “Zootopia 2” yielded the year’s best search engagement volume activity for any movie released in 2025 so far -- at 15,210.

“Wicked: For Good” added in $16.8 million after four weeks -- now at a total of $297 million domestically ($440.1 million globally). This version of “Wicked” produced 11,830 in engagement volume (EV), the fifth-best result for any movie so far.

In the last 90 days, national TV advertising spend for movie marketers has sharply increased to $233 million (48,310 airings, 30.1 billion impressions) -- up 9.5% versus $212.8 million over the same time period a year ago (44,690 airings, 27.4 billion impressions).

By comparison, year-to-date spend is down 3.4% to $844.8 million from a year ago.

However, airings are much higher -- up 14% to 211,710 airings versus 185,730.

So far this year, movie theaters are now in the positive column against the results of a year ago.

Year-to-date, box-office revenue is up 1.2% to $7.84 billion versus a year ago, according to Box Office Mojo.

For most of 2025, box-office revenue was down versus 2024.