FNAF Movie Reviews Seem Out Of Touch With The Fanbase Across The Board

(Note: This article contains some spoliers for the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie)

The Five Nights at Freddy’s Movie opened Thursday to both a booming wave of approval from movie fans in theaters and their own living rooms (via the Peacock app) and an almost universal biting of the thumb from professional critics, creating an odd set of ratings that seem out of touch with how FNAF fans actually feel about the movie.

The online hub where this sore thumb sticks out the most obviously is on popular movie rating site Rotten Tomatoes. Taking a quick peek at its FNAF Movie page, it’s currently (as of 1pm EST on Friday, one day after its release) sitting at a lowly 25 percent approval rating on the professional critics’ Tomatometer, based on 92 reviews.

But a glance just to the right shows a vastly different approval rating from those of movie fans, who are by and large pleased with how Blumhouse Productions and Striker Entertainment’s adaptation of Scott Cawthon’s series of breakaway indie horror games has turned out. With more than 100 verified Rotten Tomatoes users weighing in, the Audience Score is currently sitting at a lofty 88% approval rating, a far cry from how critics have perceived it.

The professional critiques seem to come in two flavors, or a mixture of both. The first is that, unlike the games, the movie does not include enough edge-of-your-seat jumpscares, the element of terror that popularized the games in the first place. However, drawing from the comment sections of various reviews, it doesn’t sound like this was a big disappointment for most fans. Admittedly, the movie doesn’t have a lot of blood and gore (which is reflected in its PG-13 rating), but it does give a nod to tense moments alluded to in the games, such as a woman approaching the seemingly offline Freddy animatronic only to be bit in half (although we only get to see the action in silhouette).

The Lore!

The second problem critics seem to be latching onto is the deviation from the FNAF lore, but that lore is a complicated one, and that complexity seems to be by design. From attending a panel at Cleveland Fan Expo this past summer, I can report that Freddy Fazbear voice actor Kellen Goff has admitted that Cawthon has even kept him in the dark about much of what’s actually going on. Additionally, a lot of things that seem like established canon are in fact well-crafted fan theories that have gained traction online.

Sometimes it’s the subtlety the really sells the character. -Puppet build supervisor and lead designer Robert Bennett

Furthermore, while the original games and their spinoff novelizations already comprise at least three distinct sets of lore for the game, the movie takes a fourth route, borrowing most of its elements from the first two FNAF games but placing familiar characters from the series into unfamiliar roles. For example, Vanessa, originally revealed in the games to be a scientist and later the mastermind behind the events of Security Breach (after a brainwashing/possession by series big bad Wiliam Afton) is instead a police officer who covers up murders at the abandoned pizza place to protect the ghost children who possess the animatronics from being discovered. Late in the film, it’s revealed that she’s also Afton’s daughter, forcing her to walk a metaphorical tightrope between standing up for the ghosts, standing up to her father, and protecting Mike and his younger sister from both threats.

The divide between critics and fans could potentially be due to movie critics just not being familiar with the source material, as there are a lot of nods and winks to the fanbase thrown in—Mike’s security badge and the possibly sentient Balloon Boy action figure (who first appears next to a flashlight) being good examples—but a lot of the negative criticism seems to be coming from popular gaming publications as well.

IGN gave it a lowly 4/10, citing a slow pacing that veers too much into Mike’s past trauma and family life and not enough on the monstrous animatronics, despite acknowling that Cawthon himself was active in the film’s production. Meanwhile, GameSpot gave it one of the kinder critical scores on the Internet at a 7/10, but its review still hones in on a perceived overabundance of plot, something that the fanbase seems to enjoy.

“Sometimes it’s the subtlety the really sells the character,” the film’s puppet build supervisor and lead designer Robert Bennett said in a recent A Look Inside video released by Universal Pictures. For most of the FNAF fanbase, these words seems to ring true, as the Five Nights At Freddy’s Movie is living up to fans’ expectations much better than the collaborative review-sphere would indicate.