Blumhouse Productions has announced that their Five Nights at Freddy’s project is moving forward with a director: Chris Columbus.
Mr. Columbus, are you ready for Freddy? #FiveNightsatFreddys pic.twitter.com/4F7QEnw16x
— Blumhouse (@blumhouse) February 12, 2018
It’s a potent pairing. Blumhouse is arguably the leading horror studio today, having produced the Paranormal Activity series, the Insidious series, and the Purge series, alongside a couple dozen other low and mid-budget films. The company acquired the rights to the series last year, after it failed to materialize at New Line.
Columbus meanwhile is no stranger to building cinematic worlds from source material, having directed and produced the first two Harry Potter films.
The original Five Nights at Freddy’s video game was released in 2014, and since then, five more games have been added to the core series, along with two novels, a sourcebook, a seasonal horror attraction at the Adventuredome theme park in Las Vegas, and a non-canonical RPG spin-off.
The first Five Nights at Freddy’s game began with a pretty simple premise. You play as a night security guard at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, a family restaurant where animatronic animal characters roam the establishment and interact with guests. At night however, the characters have seemingly developed a penchant for murder. Peppered throughout the experience are hints at a dark, possibly supernatural explanation for the killings.
As the series went on however, the lore has gotten increasingly more complex, and an entire community has gathered around making sense of it all. It’s not clear yet if the movie will directly adapt the timeframe of one of the existing games, add an adjacent story (similar to Assassin’s Creed), or create an entirely original universe based on the games, but regardless, there’s plenty of material to draw upon.
