A rotten video game adaptation that made too many insane decisions to count claws its way onto the streaming Top 10

Remember back in the mid-2010s when gaming YouTube channels emerged as one of the most lucrative enterprises of the modern era, compounded by titles such as Minecraft, FIFA, and a never-ending stack of horror games spearheaded by Five Nights at Freddy’s?

Well, since then, the homicidal animatronics have done a pop culture speedrun, having been at the center of 20 different games (a library whose first four titles where shoved out in just one year, no less) and, more infamously, a 2023 feature film produced by Blumhouse. It was a woefully incompetent piece of media, but it more than recouped its production budget of $20 million with a $297.1 million box office haul, so we’re definitely getting more of these. Even now, the denizens of Peacock bafflingly consider it to be somewhat worthy of their time.

Per FlixPatrol, Five Nights at Freddy’s has emerged as the 10th most watched film on the United States’ Peacock charts at the time of writing, squaring off against an influx of DreamWorks and Illumination titles, from Madagascar (ninth place) to Despicable Me 4 (first place).

Five Nights at Freddy’s stars Josh Hutcherson as Mike, a down-on-his-luck man who finds himself taking a new job as the night guard at a pizzeria, so as to keep custody of his younger sister Abby (Piper Rubio), who their wicked aunt is seeking to use to gain custody payments. Mike struggles through the job, haunted by his past, but his greatest challenge just might come in the form of the pizzeria’s animatronics, which may or may not be sentient.

The reason this movie did so well with audiences is because the YouTuber MatPat — known for his popular Game Theory videos on YouTube and subsequent connection to the game franchise — has a cameo in this film as a waiter, and he even says his YouTuber catchphrase, “It’s just a theory,” in the film.

There’s other literal reasons that audiences liked this movie, of course, but that aforementioned reason captures the full emotional truth of where the film’s popularity comes from. It’s a product wrapped in an IP that these people have based their personality on, and whenever they see the IP on something (in this case, a movie) or catch references to the thing they base their personality on, they will celebrate the movie because to do otherwise would be to abandon themselves.

That’s not to say people aren’t allowed to like things, but it would do us well to consider the link between passive viewing habits and media that only exists to serve the ego of the consumer. If we do that, maybe fans would be more eager to see the thing they love respected by a genuinely great story, rather than have it cheaply packaged around a literally and subtextually incoherent plot that hinges on Mike falling asleep and having vivid nightmares every 20 minutes.

Did it need to be a truly chilling horror movie? No, not at all. Should it have approached its narrative with an honesty that probably would have omitted the scene where Abby builds a fort with the animatronics? Yes, absolutely.