The Five Nights At Freddy’s movie is not only still happening, it’s finally moving into full production. The film will shoot early next year, using a screenplay the horror game‘s creator says has “all the right” characters, motivations, and stakes.
In a post on Reddit, Scott Cawthon, the developer of the mainline Five Nights At Freddy’s games and overseer of the Freddy’s franchise, gave an update on the movie’s progress. Titled “Bad news about the FNAF movie”, he ran through all the iterations of the script, before landing on a plot twist that the bad news is really good news, because a shooting draft is finished, and cameras roll spring 2021.
The list of iterations for the adaptation of the survival game contains some very Hollywood choices. Some, like ‘Plushies Take Manhattan’, where the Freddy’s animals took Manhattan, and one where it transpired the robots were being made for the government, were binned because they had little to do with the games. A few others played with elements from the extended lore and novels, and a couple, such as ‘Misfit Kid’, where a weird kid moves to town, finds Freddy’s, and gets trapped, got close to being kept, but just didn’t have what Scott and the producers were looking for. The winning write-up is dubbed ‘Mike’, and Cawthon says “It’s fun, it’s scary, and it has a great central story.”
Updates have been slow on the picture. The rights were originally bought by Warner Bros. for a movie back in 2015, and in 2017 Blumhouse Productions came on board to get things moving. Since then, news has amounted to comments that the script was still in active development. As if to cement this announcement, Blumhouse shared the Reddit thread on Twitter.
#FiveNightsAtFreddys creator Scott Cawthon stopped by Reddit to give an update on #FNAF: https://t.co/3R0pQuDApK
Filming will start in the spring! 🎉👏
— Blumhouse (@blumhouse) November 20, 2020
Cawthon’s been busy with the Five Night’s At Freddy’s IP, launching an initiative to help fund fangames set in the universe. Check The Digital Fix for all the best new movies and the latest news on the FNAF movie release date.