People are gearing up for the cinema over a new upcoming horror film with the title ‘Five Nights at Freddy’s’, but for those who may not know the video game based movie actually has a complicated history. From script scraps, new directors, and die-hard fans who have waited 5+ years, this seemingly simple theater release may have more to it than you thought.
Five Nights at Freddy’s, the video game (2014) by Scott Cawthon, is the first installment of the series and is actually quite simple. Game one is about Mike Schmidt, a newly hired night security guard for a family centered pizzeria. Similar to one of Chuck E. Cheese, with life sized animal mascots turned into performing robots. However, it doesn’t live up to its motto, "A magical place for kids and grown-ups alike, where fantasy and fun come to life," because rather than fantasy and fun coming to life, terror and despair do as you are forced to fend off from giant mechanical killers who try to stuff you in empty animatronic suits. As the games and story progress, the story and timeline get much more convoluted, and there is more lore behind the first game that we find out from later clues, but all we need is a basis to understand the concept.
Despite the game being made because Scott was failing as a game developer, it blew up in a massive popularity garnering thousands of fans through all ages. With that success, a movie was announced only eight months later in 2015 by Warner Bros but no other information was released.
Our next update wasn’t announced until 2017, a whole 2 years after the movie was said to be in the works. However, this wasn’t good news because what we were given was a statement from Warner Bros about how they were passing on the project and would no longer be working on the movie.
After this devastation many studios tried to take it from their hands, but in the end Blumhouse won and revealed they would be working with Cawthon on continuing with this much anticipated film. A director, Chris Columbus, was announced as well as a Producer, Jason Blum.
They planned for a 2020 release and started on the process, but later in 2018 Scott trashed the completed script and further postponed the release date. Every time people asked for updates all we were met with was “it’s coming, we’re working on it.” Fans were starting to get hopeless and tired waiting for the promised release, but it seemed every time good news was announced they were met with devastation.
This isn’t the end of the story though, because in 2022 they pumped the production gas and said they were cranking up the process. They announced Jim Henson’s Creature Shop would be helping them bring the beloved animatronics to life and Emma Tammi would be the new director. Josh Hutcherson, an already well known actor, would be our Mike Schmidt, and fans finally started to feel the movie would be coming out right around the corner.
Luckily, they were right, and an official date of October 27th, 2023 would be the day the movie was released in theaters, and October 26th the day it was released on the streaming platform 'Peacock'. It all became so much more real as advertisements were seen everywhere and posters and trailers were sent out to the public.
On this day of upload, the movie has been officially released, and all we can do is cross our fingers and hope it is as good as we have all been waiting (a long time) for.
Comments