“Five Nights at Freddy’s” promotional poster.

  “Five Nights at Freddy’s” (FNAF) is an indie-horror game developed by Scott Cawthon in 2014. The game became a cult classic instantly, rising in popularity with the help of many early Youtube gamers and theorists, such as Markiplier, Matpat and CoryxKenshin. The movie began filming in Feb. 2023, but the movie was originally confirmed in 2015, leaving fans on the edge for half a decade. The movie features “Hunger Games” star Josh Hutcherson as the protagonist Mike, Elizabeth Lail as security guard Vanessa, Piper Rubio as Abby, and “Scream” star Matthew Lillard as William Afton/Steve Raglan. 

  The movie starts off with Mike Schmidt (Hutcherson) working as a security guard at a mall, before he savagely tackles a random father, thinking he was taking a child away. Schmidt gets fired, and goes to Steve Raglan’s (Lillard) office to find a job. Raglan offers Mike a less-than-desirable night shift job at a closed down pizza place, filled with old, haunted animatronics. Although Mike initially doesn’t take the job, he hops on the opportunity when he realizes he needs to support his younger sister, Abby (Rubio), who Mike’s aunt (Mary Stuart Masterson) is trying to take away. Mike also has repetitive dreams about his brother, Garrett, who was stolen away on a camping trip. As Mike continues to show up to the pizza parlor, he realizes that his dreams and new environment overlap, and the strange animatronics have an odd tie to Abby. Along the way, he meets Vanessa (Lail), a security guard, who also has a past with the animatronics. With the help of Abby and Vanessa, Mike tries to dust off the mysteries of his past and survive the haunted pizza parlor.. 

  Despite the games being jumpscare focused, the movie didn’t showcase a large amount of scary moments. Fans were also disappointed in the movie not being exceedingly flashy and gory, even with the games not showing any violence and being fairly tame. Despite the challenge of turning video games into movies, the FNAF games came with a complex and mostly fleshed out storyline, which the movie partly took into consideration. Even though the FNAF movie took in bits and pieces of different games in the series to make a semi-understandable plot, it didn’t follow up exactly with the franchise. The movie also included unnecessary origin stories for the main character, Mike Schmidt, which led the movie to be overly messy and complicated. Although the movie definitely has its flaws, and is in no way a perfect movie, it had some perks. The easter eggs of the games sprinkled throughout the movie were fun to spot, especially the cameos of famous FNAF Youtubers, such as MatPat and CoryxKenshin. Despite the first FNAF movie being a little rough, Blumhouse Productions recently signed a deal for 2 more sequels, considering how well the first one did in the box office, raking in $132 million globally. If Blumhouse Productions fixes some of the momentous problems, the rest of the franchise has the potential to be an incredibly amazing and successful series.