The upcoming Five Nights at Freddy’s movie has found a replacement director.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the upcoming video game adaption has put Emma Tammi at the helm following the exit of Chris Columbus. Blumhouse, who is producing the horror thriller, has already tasked Jim Henson’s Creature Shop with bringing the beloved, yet creepy, animatronic horrors to the big screen.
Blumhouse boss Jason Blum tweeted (below) to add that filming on the movie will begin in February 2023.
#jimhensoncreatureshop is working on our animatronics
— Jason Blum (@jason_blum) October 5, 2022
Emma Tammi is our director
Filming on #FNAF starts in February 2023. Boom.
Tammi is perhaps best known for directing her 2018 feature film debut, The Wind – a supernatural horror set within the 1800s Wild West. She replaces Chris Columbus, who took the job of directing Five Nights at Freddy’s back in 2018 before leaving the project this time last year.
Although producer Jason Blum refused to give a reason for Columbus’ departure, he did reveal that the video game’s creator, Scott Cawthon, had not agreed on a story at the time, following ten scripts being submitted for consideration.
“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,” said Blum. “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.”
A script had earlier been approved by Blum and Columbus but was tossed out by Cawthon as it didn’t match his vision for the movie.
“It’s been a real challenge for everyone, including myself, to come up with a good screenplay for this,” he explained. “But I’m determined to find the right story. I’m sticking to what I’ve always said, either the right movie gets made or no movie gets made.”
It sounds as though that script has now been found, given filming is set to begin.
Five Nights at Freddy’s was originally released in 2014 and followed a security guard who takes an overnight job at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza… only to learn that the animatronic animals become hostile at night.
Want to read more about Five Nights at Freddy’s? Check out where it sits among the 12 best horror games on PC and get a glimpse of Five Nights at Freddy’s in VR.
Ryan Leston is an entertainment journalist and film critic for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.