Fans of the horror video game Five Nights at Freddy’s have been waiting more than seven years for the movie to materialize after it was announced in 2015. It’s been a long wait and a number of false starts, but producer Jason Blum took to Twitter to share an update with fans.
Five Nights at Freddy’s is a video game created by Scott Cawthon that puts you in the shoes of a security guard tasked with keeping an eye on a family pizza restaurant at night. The player must monitor various cameras, doors, vents, and lights to not be killed by the evil animatronic mascots.
Since its inception in 2014, there have been various different sequels and iterations of the popular game, which became popular with help of various “Let’s Play” segments on YouTube. The journey for the movie started with producers Seth Grahame-Smith, Roy Lee, and David Katzenberg from It and Gil Kenan (Ghostbusters: Afterlife) attached to direct.
After clashes with Cawthon over creative differences, Blumhouse Productions eventually acquired the rights. At one point, Harry Potter director Chris Columbus was attached, but he also left over creative differences. For a while there, it seemed like the project was dead – until now.
Blum shared an image from behind-the-scenes of the movie and revealed Blumhouse has partnered with Jim Henson’s Creature Shop and started creating the movie’s evil mascots.
In a previous interview with Screenrant, Blum said he was really focused on making sure a movie does justice to its source material. He also shared that he wanted to make sure he made something that got Cawthon’s approval.
“[The film is] 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. But we’re a long ways from giving up. And I’m confident, eventually, I will figure it out.”
More recently, he shared that news was “dangerously close” to being revealed about the project. What that news could be is open to speculation, but there’s always the possibility that a new director is attached, and Blumhouse is about to announce that. We’ll keep you posted if we hear anything else.