The Christmas lights are strung, trees are decorated, holiday spirit is in the air — and possessed animatronics are once again coming to life as Five Nights at Freddy’s returns.
The sequel to 2023’s hit horror film — based on the video game series of the same name — is breaking with the typical spooky season release schedule to debut close to Christmas, as star Josh Hutcherson joked to The Hollywood Reporter at the L.A. premiere, “It’s basically like The Santa Clause.”
“A little bit of counterprogramming is fun — I don’t like Christmas all that much myself, so if I were going to the theater, I would go see a horror movie instead of like a Christmas movie,” he added of the sequel’s release date, while co-star Matthew Lillard noted how “Christmas is saved for big films” and Five Nights at Freddy’s is in that tier after the success of the first film.
“I don’t think that everyone in Hollywood understands the full power and capacity of this fanbase, and they certainly didn’t understand it the first time round. We went day-and-date [in theaters and on Peacock] and still did really well,” Lillard pointed out, without the cast doing much promotion for it in 2023. Now they have “a bigger launch,” with hopes that it “will equal fantastic box office and hopefully a very quick greenlight of a third film.”
A third film is indeed the goal, director Emma Tammi confirmed, saying, “We’re hopeful that we’ll be able to keep going for a trilogy, but it’ll really be dependent on how everyone responds to this one and if there’s a demand for it. We’re here for it if the fans are.”
One thing the fans were vocal about is wanting the sequel to “go darker, if we could do more in terms of jump-scares, and we’ve really amped it up in this one,” Tammi emphasized. Hutcherson added, “I think it’s a little dangerous sometimes looking for feedback from an audience to then make a sequel, but in this case the feedback was great, it was making it scarier. The first one, I liked the movie but I think that it wasn’t as scary as it could have been; I think that we heard that and we agreed, so we stepped up the scariness in this second one.”
Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 hits theaters on Friday.
