When the Five Nights at Freddy's movie was originally greenlit eight years ago, the task of adapting this video game into a movie was a lot simpler. That was still right when the series was just getting started, had no meaningful lore, and was just a bare-bones story about a night security guard trying to survive a week with a bunch of murderous animatronic animals at a decrepit Chuck E Cheese-type place.

When the Five Nights at Freddy's movie is able to just be that--and it is most of the time--it's a lot of fun. Creepy and weird animatronic nonsense is a really funny part of our culture and is an excellent idea for a movie. But it can't manage to just be that, because the franchise has grown a ton since this project first began.

These days, Five Nights at Freddy's is a fully fleshed-out universe with a bunch of games and ancillary spin-offs like novels and comic books, and so there's now a metric f***ton of lore beneath everything. That's a good thing for the fans, but it made the adaptation much more difficult over the years, even with series creator Scott Cawthon co-writing the screenplay. And so the storytelling ends up in kind of an awkward spot.