Five Nights At Freddy’s Movie Took A Massive Step Back
Let’s be honest with ourselves. When we first learned that Five Nights At Freddy’s was being adapted for cinemas (and if you didn’t know until now - we’re sorry to "bear" the bad news), we didn’t expect it to be good, did we?
Video game movies have a bad track record for sure, but even though they’ve been improving with time (Detective Pikachu, thank you for your service) they’ve never truly escaped critical pannings. Five Nights At Freddy’s, a video game franchise based on an incredibly simple yet infectious gameplay loop was not expected to make a good movie. Sadly, it still isn't - especially now it's lost a key member of the team.
FNAF Movie Director Quits
Jason Blum, founder and CEO of Blumhouse, has confirmed that the Five Nights At Freddy’s director Chris Columbus has now departed the film. He revealed in an interview with Collider that the film was still going ahead and the team is still working on the script. It is still going forward, just without the Home Alone and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone director.
"We’ve written multiple scripts, and we’ve got where we’re threading a needle, which is doing justice to Five Nights At Freddy’s and making Scott [Cawthon, FNAF’s creator] happy", said Blum. "The only way that we would go about it is giving Scott… I don’t want to do something that Scott doesn’t like. Let me say that a different way. I don’t have the right to do anything Scott doesn’t like. Basically, Scott has kind of like, the equivalent of ‘final cut’ and it’s taken longer than I hoped to get the right story."
What Is The Five Nights At Freddy’s Movie About?
The synopsis of the new Five Nights At Freddy’s film is, would you believe, incredibly similar to the game’s plot. "Mike Schmidt decides to take on an easy job as a nighttime security guard at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza", reads the first synopsis of the film on iMDB. "He prepares for five quiet nights by his desk, but the surveillance cameras pick up something unexpected."
The film could still divert from this if the script is being written, but it’d be a surprise if it made such a sharp turn away from the basic story that has made the games popular. Still, an innovation on the FNAF formula would be a welcome tweak from Blumhouse. We won’t know for sure what the film will look like for some time - but we’re willing to wait. We’ll watch from afar with caution.