Five Nights at Freddy’s Movie Producer Jason Blum Says They “Haven’t Quite Figured It Out”

Development on a Five Nights at Freddy’s feature film has been ongoing for years at this point and apparently it’s not moving any quicker. Horror producer extraordinaire Jason Blum is one of the minds behind the upcoming adaptation and in a new interview he admits that while work continues on the project, things are moving very slowly. Speaking with Inverse about the project and its future, Blum’s update was short and simple, albeit perhaps with a hint of grimness in how long it’s taking. “It’s still active,” Blum said. “We haven’t quite figured it out, but we’re getting closer every day.”

He added, “The story is the big challenge. You know, Five Nights at Freddy’s should have been easier because there are books, there’s a lot of lore and storytelling. For a video game, I think it has more storytelling than almost any other. But still, the story goes down so many rabbit holes. It goes down so many different directions. It’s big. Choosing which part to tell the first time out of the gate — and how to tell it — has been tricky.”

To his credit, Blum’s not wrong. Across the many games in the series, in addition to the spin-off novels and stories written by series creator Scott Cawthon, there’s a lot of material to mine from and explore on the big screen. From elements like “The Bite of ’87” to “The Purple Guy,” anyone talking about the larger web of a narrative weaved through the titles will end up looking like Charlie Day in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia as he pours over his Pepe Silvia charts and graphs.

What we do know about the movie is that Gremlins writer and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone director Chris Columbus has been tapped to helm the film, officially coming on board back in 2018. Cawthon had previously been hired to pen the script for the film, though said two years ago that one draft of the adaptation had been scrapped entirely.

“It’s been a real challenge for everyone, including myself, to come up with a good screenplay for this,” Cawthon said in 2018. “But I’m determined to find the right story. I’m sticking to what I’ve always said, either the right movie gets made or no movie gets made. I hate delaying a project that’s already seen so many delays, but I have to go with my instincts on what I think will be exciting and interesting, and what I think the fanbase will really want to see. If that means that I have to start over ten more times, then that’s what I’m going to do. The good thing is that each attempt gets better and better, in my opinion. So, despite the delays, it’s going in the right direction.”

To hold fans of FNAF over until we learn more about the movie, another new game is on the way with Five Nights At Freddy’s: Security Breach set to be released this year for the PlayStation 5.