A ‘Five Nights at Freddy’s’ Movie Could Never Compare to the Games
That laughter you hear? It’s not some animatronic bear lurking in the darkness, waiting to scare the snot out of you. It's the sound of a fanbase vindicated. Despite widely withering reviews (including this one from The Daily Beast, and, uh, also this one) and the simultaneous opportunity to stream the film on Peacock, the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie scared up big business over the weekend, earning an unexpectedly robust, record-breaking $78 million in American theaters.
It really shouldn’t be surprising that the movie opened huge. After all, it’s the latest building block of a true media empire: a hit video game series that just keeps expanding into sequels, spinoffs, novels, fan art, and enough merchandise to fill every square inch of an abandoned family fun center. Five Nights at Freddy’s has an extremely loyal, protective following. And the film caters to that crowd with a fairly faithful adaptation of the games' haunted-pizzeria lore. It didn't really need to be “good” or even particularly scary to sell a bunch of tickets. It just needed to repackage the things people already love about FNAF.
There’s one aspect of the source material the movie didn’t preserve, though, and that’s the nerve-shredding experience of actually playing the games. Replicating that was always going to be a tall order, and hence probably never a priority for the filmmakers. A truly faithful adaptation would be an exercise in extreme minimalism, set in a single room and focused mostly on a character studying video monitors for signs of trouble. Not shockingly, Hollywood opted for something a little more narratively conventional, building actual characters and a plot around developer Scott Cawthon’s original, bare-bones premise.