Burning through one of the most front-loaded opening weekends on record, A
Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) boiled atop the box office with an estimated $32.2 million on approximately 4,700 screens at 3,332 sites. Beneath Freddy's
latest resurrection, Furry Vengeance got razed in its debut, but the holdovers
couldn't pick up enough slack for an up weekend: overall business was down around 11 percent from the late April weekend last year.
The Nightmare on Elm Street remake saw greater initial attendance than Halloween
(2007), and it was a personal best for Freddy Krueger in a solo outing. It even out-grossed the entire runs of the first, second, fifth and seventh Nightmare movies
(albeit not in terms of tickets sold). The debut was also a new horror high for either April or May, surpassing The
Amityville Horror (2005), and it ranked seventh overall for the month of April.
The new Nightmare, though, delivered a lower opening body count than Friday
the 13th (2009), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Freddy
Vs. Jason. The Friday the 13th remake, which was from the same producer as Nightmare (Michael Bay and his Platinum Dunes
banner), nabbed $40.6 million on its first weekend and rapidly bled out to a $65 million final.
Friday accounted for nearly 48 percent of Friday the 13th's weekend gross, but Nightmare had an even greater Friday cut:
it made $15.8 million or over 49 percent of its weekend on Friday alone, ranking fifth on the all time list of most Friday-loaded first weekends, behind only Saw
VI, the Twilight movies and Hannah
Montana The Movie. Further indicating the rabidity of Freddy's followers, the picture boasted the horror midnight opening record with $1.6 million at 1,000
sites.
Nightmare distributor Warner Bros.' exit polling showed that the audience was evenly split between genders and that 40 percent was 18-24
years old and 20 percent was under 18. Given the popularity of the Nightmare franchise in general, anticipation was high for the reboot, but ultimately
it was a trickier proposition than remaking a faceless killing machine like Jason due to Freddy actually being a character with dialogue. Nightmare remakers
and marketers went for the same visually slick approach seen with many recent horror movies, and the trailer further dulled Freddy's fright impact by showing his origin,
making him look like a possibly innocent victim running in fear from a mob.
