The Five Nights at Freddy’s series of horror games may be coming up on its tenth birthday, but for a huge market—mostly kids, even if they were never the original, intended audience—it’s still a huge deal. Which, alongside nostalgia for older players, might explain why only now is FNaF getting a movie.
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The film—out in theatres in October—just dropped its first trailer, and if nothing else, it’s looking incredibly faithful to the source material:
The film follows a troubled security guard as he begins working at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. While spending his first night on the job, he realizes the night shift at Freddy’s won’t be so easy to make it through.
This movie has been a long time coming! Not just because the franchise itself is so old, but because plans for a big screen adaptation date all the way back to 2015, when we first posted that Warner Bros. were interested in making it, with Roy Lee of Vertigo Entertainment (Run All Night, The Ring, The Grudge) attached, along with Seth Grahame-Smith and David Katzenberg of KatzSmith Productions (Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies).
That project died two years later, when series creator Scott Cawthorn posted on Steam in February 2017:
Hey guys,
I know that I promised some movie news by the end of the month, so here it is. However, keep in mind that there are still some very important discussions in progress, so the amount of information that I can share is extremely limited. In fact, even the information that I can share will have to remain somewhat cryptic.
The reality is that last year the FNaF movie was met with several delays and roadblocks, some involving problems within the movie industry as a whole. As a result, as of right now, the movie is back at square one.
However, depending on your point of view, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s bad because the movie is in its early stages again (so don’t expect a trailer anytime soon), but it’s good because I want to make sure that the right movie gets made, and things are on track right now for that to happen.
I’m also going to be involved with the movie from day one this time, and that’s something extremely important to me. I want this movie to be something that I’m excited for the fanbase to see.
The movie has since found its way to Universal, surviving everything from personnel changes (though Cawthorn has remained attached throughout) to script issues.
Five Nights at Freddy’s stars Josh Hutcherson (The Hunger Games) as Mike Schmidt, while Matthew Lillard (!) and Mary Stuart Masterson (!!) will also be appearing. It’s out in theatres on October 27, with a simultaneous release on NBC/Universal’s streaming service Peacock.