When the Five Nights at Freddy’s video game was adapted into a movie in 2023, it was pretty clear by the way the ending set up a sequel that the filmmakers were confident fans would buy in. Sure enough, it was a box office hit, and two years later, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is hitting the 2025 movie calendar for more animatronic frights. Critics have seen the upcoming horror movie, and they've got some pretty harsh opinions.
FNAF 2 takes place a year after the events of the original, with Abby Schmidt (Piper Rubio) reconnecting with Freddie Fazbear and her other friends from the pizza place. Josh Hutcherson, Elizabeth Lail and Matthew Lillard also reprise their roles, with Skeet Ulrich joining the universe as Henry Emily, who — at least in video game lore — co-founded Fazbear Entertainment with Lillard’s William Afton. In CinemaBlend’s review of Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, Eric Eisenberg says the sequel has stooped to new lows. He rates it 1.5 stars out of 5, writing:
Five Nights At Freddy’s 2 has been flying red flags ever since it was first announced, and it crawls under the low bar that has been set for it. In broad strokes, it is wildly dull, with its only energy provided by its parade of telegraphed and repetitive jump scares. More significant, though, is just how incompetent it manages to be in its storytelling – in terms of both narrative flow and its character development.
Josh Oller of AV Club agrees this sequel is crushed by heavy-duty incompetence, with director Emma Tammi still unable to stage a horror set piece or an effective shock. Oller gives the movie an F and says:
Lit, paced, and cut like an actual commercial for a pizza place, the film gives little indication that it understands it’s a horror film until someone kicks the bucket. But few sequences end with dead bodies; all end with dead air. This leaves the various bright and shiny creations of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop to whir and stomp around listlessly. Rather than these being the film’s point of visual pride, Five Nights At Freddy’s 2 instead obsesses over game props and Easter eggs. Its own characters quickly undermine these, ashamed of the silliness that spawned them.
Matt Donato of IGN wonders if even diehard Scott Cawthorn fans will be able to defend this bare-minimum video game adaptation. It lacks enthusiasm in everything it attempts, Donato writes, saying it’s time to “pull the plug, reboot the system.” The critic gives the movie an “Awful” 3 out of 10, writing:
Five Nights at Freddy's 2 gives sequels, video game adaptations, and gateway horror movies a bad name. Cawthon adheres too rigidly to his franchise's muddy mythology, coyly withholding some information and dumping exposition elsewhere—both at the bafflingly wrong times. Tammi is a gun for hire here, bringing no secret sauce to the pizza party. The saving grace of outstanding animatronics is worth embarrassingly little when ‘generic as sin’ is the nicest compliment anything else deserves.
BJ Colangelo of SlashFilm rates the movie 4 out of 10, saying the Jim Henson's Creature Shop creations are fantastic and that the film “absolutely soars” when we finally get Mike in the security office. However, it ultimately fails to deliver anything worth celebrating due to a disastrous script, and Colangelo says Blumhouse would be smart to replace Scott Cawthorn as screenwriter for the inevitable threequel. The critic continues:
Five Nights at Freddy's 2 delivers about 15 minutes of genuinely terrific thrills that feel ripped straight from the games, but they're flanked by baffling plot threads that are somehow even more tangled than the source material. Unapologetic fan service masquerades as exposition, setups go nowhere, and yet the fandom will undoubtedly devour it all without hesitation. Kids, you deserve better-tasting slop.
Aiden Kelley of Collider, meanwhile, sees plenty of positives, giving FNAF 2 a 6-out-of-10 rating and saying it’s scarier and more entertaining than the original in almost every way. The critic says steps were taken to correct two big drawbacks of the first movie — no real scares and a plot that takes itself too seriously. Kelley continues:
Those two things were the biggest aspects needed for a course correction, and thankfully, Five Nights at Freddy's 2 does exactly that. This may not be saying all that much, but the sequel is trying to pack in a lot more scares than the morose first movie, with admittedly the large bulk of them being loud, deafening jump scares. Those are an acquired taste for most horror fans, but in fairness, jump scares have always been in the franchise's DNA.
As noted by many of the critics, the Five Nights at Freddy’s franchise has such a passionate fanbase that there’s likely nothing that will keep them away from theaters. (My own teenage FNAF fanatic is actually at a showing as I write this.) But just to make the critics’ collective opinion official, the sequel is opening to a pretty dismal 12% Rotten Tomatoes score.
Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 hits the big screen on Friday, December 5.
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