Five Nights at Freddy’s Will Not Get an R-Rated Director’s Cut

Five Nights at Freddy’s will unfortunately forego any kind of R-rated version. Movie ratings are one of the most important factors in a movie. It determines your audience, how the film will be presented, the creative freedoms and limitations afforded to you, and much more. In the age of home video, more creators have gotten to take advantage of different ratings. They may make a movie that could be R-rated and edit it down to be PG-13, ensuring it can reach more people and therefore make more money, but then release the R-rated version on DVD which is a good marketing tactic and ensures the “original” vision is maintained. Zack Snyder has made a habit of this, particularly with his DC films as Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice had an R-rated cut with an additional 30 minutes of footage and was deemed to be the superior cut as a result. On a much larger scale, Zack Snyder’s Justice League was a four hour R-rated cut, but that’s for totally different reasons. Nevertheless, it wouldn’t have been surprising if he had released a PG-13 cut back in 2017 in theaters and then an R-rated version for home video the following year.

One of this year’s biggest releases, Five Nights at Freddy’s, is based on an incredibly popular horror game series. The franchise tends to skew toward a younger audience, so the film will be rated PG-13 and ensure it balances its darker elements without any kind of excessive violence or gore. When speaking to Forbes to promote the movie, director Emma Tammi confirmed that there won’t be any kind of R-rated cut for Five Nights at Freddy’s released later down the line as they’re content with the current version of the film.

“I would say not to expect an R-rated version on this one. We’re really happy with how the PG-13 tone landed; it felt like the right fit for this particular film. We’re sticking by it.”

Why Is Five Nights at Freddy’s Rated PG-13?

As for why Five Nights at Freddy’s stuck with the PG-13 rating, Tammi noted to Forbes that it was important for the film to still include the younger audience and still execute something that felt dark.

“We knew that some of the fan base would want an R-rated version of this film,” she said. “On the one level, we wanted to be inclusive of the younger audiences and knew we were going to hit the PG-13 rating, but for the audience that also wanted that level of violence, if you will, or at least insinuation of violence, we really wanted to still include elements that felt dark.”

“Of course, there are a lot of dark elements to see in the lore, but in terms of some of the kills and everything, it was just all execution dependent. We really wanted to ensure that we were showing the right amount and doing creative things to insinuate what was happening or show what was happening without fully seeing it to still fit in that PG-13 category.”  

Five Nights at Freddy’s hits theaters this weekend.