It only took over a decade for Hollywood to realize how easily they could capitalize on video game franchises. A prime example would be The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which was released in spring of 2023 and grossed 1.36 billion dollars at the box office. Following suit is the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie (FNAF) and franchise which has continued to be relevant for almost 10 years and made 80 million dollars at the box office within the first weekend of release.
Before the movie, there was the game, which was originally released on Aug. 8, 2014 by Scott Cawthon. The rise of the FNAF franchise began with the rise of streaming and gaming culture on YouTube when people like PewDiePie, Markiplier and CoryxKenshin began posting first-time Playthroughs that showcased the contents of the game which aided the growth of an intense following for it.
One of the things FNAF is infamously known for is the extensive lore behind the franchise. While the movie only touches the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the entire story, it does an outstanding job of covering what it can without putting everyone in the audience to sleep. The film follows sleep-deprived mall cop Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson) after getting fired from his job and trying to make ends meet to take care of his little sister Abby. When he gets fired, he meets with his career counselor, Steve Raglan (Matthew Lillard) who offers him a job with awful hours at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria, an old, closed-down family entertainment center where he finds four violence -prone animatronics.
The special effects, set design and graphics in the movie were amazing, and it stayed true to the original design in the game. The size of the animatronics was actually kind of terrifying. While the special effects graphics and set design were indisputably great, the scare factor of the movie is up for discussion. Before the release of the movie, fans of FNAF were worried over whether or not it would live up to the standards of the game or fail and seem corny. I personally didn’t think the movie was scary enough to be considered a horror film, but I liked how it took the mystery route instead.
Seeing as the game was released in 2014, the age demographic for most enjoyers of the FNAF franchise is most likely somewhere between the ages of 11-21. With such a broad age range, I can see how it would be hard to make the movie scary enough for adults but tame enough for children to watch without crossing over into the gray area of a rated R movie. Rating the movie PG-13 was most likely the best move for its audience.
Though the film encompasses the gist of the lore pretty well, there were a couple of plot holes that wouldn’t make sense if you were like me and didn’t know anything about the backstory. Toward the end of the movie, a plot twist is revealed, and one of the lines from Cathlan to his daughter is “ This was all your fault!” For someone who has never dived deep into the franchise before, it didn’t really come full circle when that was said.
To piggyback off of this, some of the scenes in the movie were just kind of unbelievable and corny, specifically the ones where the animatronics and Abby interact. The scenes didn’t feel right. If it was a stylistic choice to make these scenes so off-puttings, then they did a great job.
While FNAF is extremely eerie, it is also deeply rooted in YouTube gaming and streaming culture, and I think that the director of the movie, Emma Tammi, realizes this. In the film, one of the cameos that we see is MatPat, who is known for his videos that analyze different games on his channel, The Game Theorists, one of them being Five Nights at Freddy’s. Another cameo that we see is from Youtuber CoryxKenshin who has done multiple playthroughs of the game series on his channel. I thought it was nice that they incorporated people who have contributed to the overall popularity of the game in the movie.
Overall I thought that while the movie did have some iffy pieces of dialogue, and the shock value wasn’t great, it was still entertaining and enjoyable to watch. So, I would give it 4/5 stars.
