Five Nights At Freddy’s Movie Loses Director Chris Columbus
Producer Jason Blum has confirmed that the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie has lost director Chris Columbus and still hasn’t found the perfect script.
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Director Chris Columbus has exited Blumhouse’s film adaptation of Five Nights at Freddy’s. The director is best known for big-ticket family movies like Home Alone and its sequel, Mrs. Doubtfire, Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, and the first two Harry Potter movies. When Columbus was attached to Five Nights at Freddy’s in 2018, that film would have been his first straightforward horror movie, allowing him to draw on the impulses he indulged when he wrote the script for Gremlins back in the early ’80s.
Five Nights at Freddy’s is a long-gestating project that has been hitting roadblocks from the beginning. The film is an adaptation of the 2014 video game of the same name, in which the player is a security guard at a Chuck E. Cheese-esque establishment full of creepy haunted animatronics. Horror production company Blumhouse became attached to the project in 2017, but they’ve had trouble finding a script that pleases creator Scott Cawthon, who has rejected 9 different drafts. In the meantime, there have been 8 games released with a ninth on the way, 3 spinoff games, 3 novels and 12 anthology books written, and a Nicolas Cage film with the exact same premise called Willy’s Wonderland.
Speaking with Collider, producer Jason Blum announced that even though Five Nights at Freddy’s was supposed to begin filming in Spring of this year, Chris Columbus has stepped away from the project. He didn’t explain why the director parted ways with Freddy’s, but he reiterated his constant refrain that the script is “really tough to crack.” It’s “taken longer than [he] hoped to get the right story,” but he states confidently that they are “a long way from giving up.” Read the full quote here:
Chris Columbus is no longer attached. [Whether there’s a new director] is classified information. [The script is] really tough to crack.
We’ve written multiple scripts, and we’ve got where we’re threading a needle, which is doing justice to Five Nights at Freddy’s and making Scott (Cawthon) happy. The only way that we would go about it is giving Scott … I don’t want to do something that Scott doesn’t like. Let me say that a different way. I don’t have the right to do anything Scott doesn’t like. Basically, Scott has kind of like the equivalent of “final cut” and it’s taken longer than I hoped to get the right story.
We’re a long way from giving up. And I’m confident eventually I will figure it out.
Some of the scripts that have been rejected by Cawthon have wild premises. As detailed in a Reddit post made by the creator in November of last year, the story ideas included “an underground factory that was designing robots for the government,” “a marionette out for revenge” and one where the “Plushies take Manhattan.” He eventually tried writing a screenplay himself, because he has the most familiarity with the lore, but didn’t think he was any good at writing in the format. Although at the time he announced that they had reached an agreement on a final screenplay, clearly that is no longer the case.
Hopefully, it won’t take long to attach a new director considering the company’s access to a huge stable of talented horror filmmakers. As for the script, Five Nights at Freddy’s might have quite a bit of backstory at this point because of the many games that have since been released in the series, but it might be good for Blumhouse to favor simplicity. The game ultimately has a very pared-down premise for delivering scares and doesn’t need too much dressing up. Fans who have played through the entire franchise will enjoy a bunch of Easter eggs and developed mythology, but that isn’t essential to delivering the powerful shocks the games are known for.
Link Source : https://screenrant.com/five-nights-freddys-movie-director-chris-columbus-updates/