Video game adaptations to film rarely turn out well. This is not the fault of the video game, but of the film industry. Neither are the titles chosen for adaptation well, nor is the original work respected, nor is there an attempt to understand what makes it special. It also doesn’t help that both are audiovisual media, making it too easy to make comparisons. This creates terrible situations where, no matter what is done, things are going to go wrong. It becomes very important to know which video games can be adapted and, above all, who and how can do it.
If a production company has had an excellent eye for capturing the pulse of the audience, it is Blumhouse. Their horror productions work excellently, especially among a young audience, knowing how to target them with surgical precision. This is something they have also demonstrated by licensing titles to turn into movies.
A success thanks to understanding your audience
This was the case with Five Nights at Freddy’s. An adaptation of the video game by Scott Cawthon first published in 2014, the movie aimed to recreate the same sensations that the video game provoked. And it seems to have succeeded. With a budget of just 20 million dollars, it managed to gross almost 300 million, even though critics panned the film in the press. With a 32% on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 213 reviews, and a 33 out of 100 on Metacritic, the film might seem like a failure. Except that audience scores place it around 77% on PostTrak.
What accounts for such a difference between the critics’ and the audience’s opinions? Not that either side is wrong. Or not exactly. Because Five Nights at Freddy’s does something spectacularly well, and that is knowing how to address a very specific audience, young fans of the video game, and sticking exclusively to their interests.
Five Nights at Freddy’s is a video game saga where we play the role of a security guard at a pizzeria where there are strange animatronic mascots. While we watch these mascots through the cameras, they won’t move, but when we stop looking at them, they will start moving erratically, and at some point, they will head towards where we are. Our goal is to survive until morning without being hunted by the mascots, considering that there are more mascots than cameras and more places they can move to than we can monitor.
This premise has hooked several generations of kids, turning it into a bestseller. Success that can be explained by its spread through YouTube and Twitch, which also explains the misunderstanding it generates among older generations, who see in these games a whole series of clichés without particular charm. This explains the reaction of the critics.
A risk that the movie faced was trying to make the video game deeper. Adding layers, ironizing or parodying what the original is. The movie does none of that and takes the original video game seriously, adapting it in the strictest way possible, expanding it and adding aspects of its internal lore, reinforcing the possibilities of the game in cinematic terms. Something that would later be done by a Minecraft movie. And therein lies its success. It offers exactly what its fans want: a Five Nights at Freddy’s movie.
A movie you can watch again at home
This makes the movie full of clichés, shallow, and of little interest to those who have already seen a lot of horror films. But it is a delight for those who are fans of Five Nights at Freddy’s or, in general, have hardly seen any horror in their lives and are not familiar with its tropes. Demonstrating that sometimes, the most basic is what works best.
Something you can check for yourself, because Five Nights at Freddy’s arrives on streaming on Thursday, June 19, specifically on Movistar+. This gives us the opportunity to see this great box office success, even if it didn’t please the critics, arriving at the perfect time. Why? Because the second part, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, will be released at the end of the year. Specifically, in December, in another demonstration that this is aimed at a young audience: this time they are not targeting Halloween, but directly Christmas, when kids will be on vacation.
Something that demonstrates Blumhouse’s good eye. Especially when they want to repeat this move in the future, adapting another horror video game that caused a stir among YouTubers and streamers: Phasmophobia. Although this bet seems riskier, being even more cliché and with perhaps a less youthful audience, it remains to be seen if they will succeed again. Because what is clear is that, at Blumhouse, they know where to put their money.
