Video game adaptations are dicey prospects, but when you hire the writer who brought you Gremlins and Goonies and the director that brought you Home Alone, Mrs. Doubtfire and the first two Harry Potter films, your prospects for success get way better. So, the prospects for the Five Nights at Freddy’s film look really good.
Deadline is reporting that Chris Columbus will be writing, directing and producing the video game adaptation for Blumhouse Productions.
Mr. Columbus, are you ready for Freddy? #FiveNightsatFreddys pic.twitter.com/4F7QEnw16x
— Blumhouse (@blumhouse) February 12, 2018
In case you’ve been living under a rock for the last four years, Five Nights at Freddy’s is a 2014 indie video game created by Scott Cawthon which place the player in the Chuck E. Cheese-esque Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza as a night watchmen. Unfortunately for the player, the animatronic animals come to life at night and have developed a taste for killing. The player has to avoid the robots in order to survive until morning.
The game was a smash success, spawning five sequels and a ton of tie-in merchandise such as T-shirts, toys, novelizations, costumes and much more.
While films that Columbus had a hand in have earned over $4.1 billion at the box office, I feel the need to point out that his last film, also a foray into the world of video games, was 2015’s Pixels, which was lambasted by the critics and disappointed at the box office. However, if he keeps Adam Sandler far, far away from this film, he should be okay.
The project was originally at Warner Brothers/New Line with Poltergeist’s Gil Kenan set to direct.
I mean, this is no less a weird mismatch than Columbus’s RENT adaptation.