Bonnie, Freddy, and Chica in the film adaptation of the popular video game franchise “Five Nights at Freddy’s”. Photo by Blumhouse Productions.

Five Nights at Freddy’s has been the most anticipated movie of 2023, next to the Barbie movie that was released over the summer. “Five Nights at Freddy’s” is a movie, based on a game franchise, created by Scott Cawthon back in 2014. The series originally took off and went viral, when famous “let’s play” youtuber Markiplier uploaded his let’s play of the game. This sent the internet into a craze to which the company then responded by pushing out a total of 20 different games: Ten main games, 6 spin-offs and 4 troll games.

Five Nights at Freddy’s (FNAF) has been lived and cherished by the internet for years. Only a year after the success of the first game, an official movie was announced by Warner Brothers entertainment, which was ultimately taken over by the horror movie production company Blumhouse Productions.

The movie follows the original storyline of the first game, which was a nice nod to the fans watching the movie. Some familiar names being Mike Schmidt, played by Josh Hutcherson (who also played Peeta in the original Hunger Games series), William Afton played by Matthew Lillard (the original scream killer and the live action version of Shaggy from Scooby-Doo). 

Overall the movie would be rated around an 8 out of 10, a few minor plot holes did stand and a different approach to the topic than what fans were hoping for. The plot holes would be a simple fix, simply changing the character of Mike to be who he was in the original series, rather than a completely different character would have added more mystery or surprise to the movie’s big reveal.

The set design was immaculate, Jim Henson Productions created the life size animatronics that were used for most, if not all of the animatronic shots. The world around the animatronics was also done very nicely and accurately to the feel and building design of the first game. The animatronics had proper backstories with matching characters and representations, as well as stuck to the original storyline that creator Scott Cawthon had created.

The movie seemed rushed and appeared to only hit night five, so the main antagonist could do his piece in the film, the costume design for the antagonist was wonderfully done though, the wear and tear look was done great by the designers.

The ending I thought was very nice, a calm but subtle hint at a possible second movie based on the series with the main characters ending happier than they started. Overall, the FNAF movie was a great representation of pop culture being replicated into movie form without making a cinematic disaster, like the resident evil series eventually turned into after a few movies.