The “Five Nights at Freddy’s” movie was released in theaters and began streaming on Peacock on October 27. This movie is based on Scott Cawthon’s famous video game “Five Nights at Freddy’s.” Emma Tammi, the director of the film, co-wrote the screenplay with the help of Cawthon and Seth Cuddeback. Fans of the video game are excited to see this horror/thriller movie come to life.
The game takes place at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, a family’s pizza shop. The restaurant is filled with animatronic characters such as Freddy Fazbear, a brown bear who wears a top hat and bowtie. Players take on the role of the night shift guard looking after the characters in the restaurant. The characters act normal during the day, but at night they take on new identities and become violent. The goal of the guard is to use the security cameras, lights, doors and vents to survive the night with the raving characters. The guard should be flipping through the security cameras searching for sudden movements and should hide if a character has moved from its location. If caught by a character, the game is over.
To make the game more challenging, players have a limited supply of energy. Once the energy for the night is used up, things such as the safety doors and lights will be inoperable. The guards are supposed to rely on these features to help watch the characters, so not having them makes the game more difficult.
Cawthon created his original version of the video game on August 8, 2014. Since then, many other versions of the game have been created, as well as a series of three comic books. Various spin-off games have also been released. The video games are available on a variety of platforms including mobile devices, Playstation, Xbox and Nintendo Switch.
In April of 2014 during the initial stages of creating the movie, many issues occurred. Originally, Warner Bros. Pictures was the production company. Roy Lee, David Katzenberg and Seth Grahame-Smith were the producers and Gil Kenan was the director and co-writer. After experiencing many problems and delays, the director and Warner Bros. decided to quit filming because they felt the production was not moving forward. Later, in March of 2017, Blumhouse Productions took over the film and had Chris Columbus direct and co-write. Similar to Kenan, Columbus ended up abandoning the project. This prompted Emma Tammi to take on the production as director in October of 2022.
Another issue that arose during the film’s production was the writing of the script. In August of 2018, Cawthon and his co-author of three novels, Kira Breed-Wrisley, finished writing the script for the movie. All was running smoothly until November 2018 when Cawthon announced that he trashed the script. He decided that he had a different idea for the movie that he would prefer to see on screen. This script dilemma set back the film’s start date from March of 2021 to February 1, 2023.
Despite these challenges, the company successfully finished filming and producing “Five Nights at Freddy’s.” The production team suffered many setbacks but overcame these issues and continued with the film process. This film, which hit the big screen on October 27, was just in time for the Halloween season.
