Look, don't act all shocked. Video game movies have come a long way since the days of Uwe Boll, but it honestly felt like the first Five Nights At Freddy's did enough to capture the evil Chuck E. Cheese mythos. I certainly didn't come away needing to see any more. But horror movies print money, as evidenced by the nearly $300 million haul of the 2023 effort. Everybody involved was always going back to this well.
FNAF creator Scott Cawthon took over as a writer and producer to make sure the film stayed true to his vision. Folks, making good movies is not easy, and very few people do it right the first time. Christian Toto, in adding FNAF 2 to his Worst of 2025 list, noted the franchise got worse under its creator's guidance:
"FNAF was a downer, a mediocre shocker, a mediocre shocker that pleased the game’s hardcore fan base above others. “Five Nights at Freddy’s 2” makes the first film look good by comparison.
Very good. And “FNAF” was nothing of the kind."
In a review titled "Is It An Easter Egg that Five Nights at Freddy's 2 Is So Terrible?" AV Club's Jacob Oller explains that the storytelling style that made Cawthon rich works better in games than movies:
It’s Cawthon’s games where, in the cracks of a simple repeated loop—sitting at a desk keeping killer animatronics at bay until they inevitably jump-scare you—drips and drabs of convoluted mystery spill out. Parsing the dense details of the story, endlessly consuming YouTube explainers, is what this series is all about. And Five Nights At Freddy’s 2replicates the experience: It’s like watching a table read of a Fandom wiki, cut off mid-article."
Our Gabriel Noda gave it a 3 out of 5, but also mentions that anyone not already steeped in FNAF lore will struggle to understand what's happening.
"FNAF 2, just like the first one, is for fans of the franchise, so I will preface this by saying, if you have not watched/played or even experienced the horror gaming franchise and are choosing to enter the film without any knowledge of the games, you will not enjoy this film," he wrote.
But remember what I said about horror movies printing money? Fans of the games love the movies, and they have an 80 percent audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Friday the 13th hasn't lasted 40 years at Siskel and Ebert's insistence. Springtrap and his cohorts will shamble on as long as they're making money.