So, I was chatting with some people earlier today, and remembered that every so often we hear about a Five Nights at Freddy’s movie.  We’ve probably all seen movie adaptations of games where they lost the essence of the game, but I think that FNAF could be good if done right.

I don’t know a way to communicate this to Scott Cawthon or anyone else who would be involved in such a project, but here is my outline of what I think would be a decent start for a Five Nights at Freddy’s movie.  Yes, it’s rough, but I think an outline similar to this could make a pretty good movie.  Preferably PG-13.  Also, yes, I know I’m not a screenwriter or movie producer, so obviously stuff would change, I just felt like including some of the details that I could visualize clearly.  This would not be fully canonical to the games (lots of details are wrong according to later games), but it should get across a simplified version of the story, before much more of the lore was added.

 

Start with the protagonist (let’s call him Mike Schmidt) as a child.

Introduce their friends.  The introduction should include some recognizable quirk (example: Mike gets a catch phrase that he says in front of their friends, possibly while play fighting a certain way)

The group goes to a large birthday party at Freddy Fazbear’s.

The friends disappear one by one over the party.

Mike looks for them, and sees a back room, just as the front plate of one of the animatronic suits is closed by a guy in the night security guard uniform.  The guy turns towards the kid (face cut out of the frame) and starts moving towards him, maybe trying to lure him back too.  Before the guard gets there, one of the parents whisks Mike away, telling him it’s time to go, not seeing the menacing man.

Later that evening Mike hears his parents talking with the frantic parents of his friends, not knowing where their kids are.  The next day his parents move out of town in a panic, not wanting their son to disappear like the other kids did.  Mike gets an ominous glimpse of the security guard.

Jump years forward, to Mike having grown up and moved back to town (my ideal casting would be Chris Pratt, but I doubt they’d get him).  He’s gone to therapy and possibly repressed some of the memories.  He’s desperate for money, so he accepts a job as a night security guard at a new Freddy’s location, reopened years after closing after the missing children incident.

He needs to have a moment of doubt when he sees the uniform, but not know why.

The new location has both new and old animatronics in it.  The first night or two should be terrifying for him, and needs to include some of the phone guy tapes.  This section should be very reminiscent of the early games in the series.

After a few nights of learning things, and getting past the horror and panic, he’s mastered the job to the point of enjoying it, similar to Night at the Museum after the new guard figured out what to do to keep everything together.

Make a montage of scenes like these:

Note: Some of these don’t work at every FNAF location, so it might require hybridizing locations 1 and 2.

“Bad dog!”  as he flashes the flashlight at Mangle to get him to back off.

“Not today!” as he shuts the electric doors in the face of an animatronic.

Spinning around in the chair with the Freddy mask on, shooing the animatronics away.

Tossing batteries to balloon boy so he doesn’t drain the flashlight’s batteries.

He gets to one night (probably night 4), though, where his carefully prepped defenses are messed up.  Someone else has been in the restaurant in his areas, and messed with his tricks and traps.

The animatronics start to get to him, and in the process his badge gets ripped off.  A bit later he gets cornered by Freddy himself, backed up by the other original electronics.  In a last ditch attempt, Mike attempts to fight, using the ridiculous move and catchphrase from earlier in the movie, but bounces off in pain.

The animatronics stop, and Freddy whispers Mike’s name, questioningly, then backs off, and Mike gets away.

At some point (probably night 5) Mike finds out that the killer is back in the building, and another kid has disappeared (maybe her mother called the restaurant, frantically looking for her).  He frees her from where she has been locked into a suit in a back room, and he ends up having to fight the killer, maybe dodging him around the building.

At some point Mike pieces the clues together that the original suits are possessed by the ghosts of the original missing children.  The killer is aware of this as well, and wants to try to create more, having learned of this crazy supernatural power.

The killer tries to engineer a situation where the suits kill Mike… but Mike is able to get them to remember him, and realize that the other guy is the one who killed them.

In his terror, the killer runs back to the Springtrap suit, trying to use it to disguise himself from the robots.  Once he does so, he might start disabling the other suits.

Mike, recalling the training tapes about springlock suits, gets Springtrap to be exposed to water, triggering the springlocks to release, killing Springtrap just before he can kill Mike (off-screen, while Mike flinches).

Mike shoves Springtrap’s corpse into a hidden section of the building.  The place gets shut down again, and abandoned.  As the owner turns off lights and closes the building up, the camera pulls off from following him and looks into a gap in the wall, where the Springtrap suit is stashed.  The eyes of the animatronic flash purple as the scene fades.