The upcoming Five Nights at Freddy’s movie adaptation has run into a production snag as a director previously attached to the project, Chris Columbus, will no longer be involved. That’s according to a Collider interview with Blumhouse CEO Jason Blum, who is producing the film.
“Chris Columbus is no longer attached,” Blum stated matter-of-factly. The Harry Potter and Home Alone director had been associated with the project since about 2018. When asked whether they have a new filmmaker lined up to take Columbus’s place, Blum stopped short of giving an answer, saying “That is classified information.”
The film has now been years in development, with a Warner Bros.-helmed project reportedly having Monster House director Gil Kenan before Blumhouse scooped up the rights to the 2014 horror game.
Aside from finding the right person to sit in the director chair, finding a script that lives up to the slow-burn terror of the game has also proved a challenge, with Blum saying “It’s really tough to crack.”
“We’ve written multiple scripts, and we’ve got where we’re threading a needle, which is doing justice to Five Nights at Freddy’s and making Scott (Cawthon) happy. The only way that we would go about it is giving Scott … I don’t want to do something that Scott doesn’t like. Let me say that a different way. I don’t have the right to do anything Scott doesn’t like. Basically, Scott has kind of like the equivalent of ‘final cut’ and it’s taken longer than I hoped to get the right story.”
Whatever the case of the development issues are with the Five Nights At Freddy’s movie adaptation, we’re just glad to hear it’s still under development as we’ve had enough wading through knock off films that have arisen in its delay, such as Nicolas Cage’s Willy’s Wonderland or the new horror-bent The Banana Splits Movie.