Five Nights at Freddy’s 2
Five Nights at Freddy’s 2
A new video game adaptation has just hit theaters, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, the sequel to the original, based on a property with a die-hard, usually young fanbase. It has split critics and audiences, as the first one did, but with one of the highest disparities I’ve ever seen.
Rotten Tomatoes scores can surprise you one way or the other, but here? This is hilariously low. Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 has a 12% Rotten Tomatoes score from critics, down from the also-bad 33% of the original. In contrast, it has an 89% audience score, a 77% difference. And that’s similar to the 86% of part 1.
This is not, however, the lowest scored video game movie recently. That honor goes to 2024’s Borderlands movie, which originally debuted with a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, but ended up at a 10%. Believe it or not, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 doesn’t make the bottom ten of video game movie adaptations, as there were some awful ones in the 2005-2015 era, from Alone in the Dark to Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li to Bloodrayne to Silent Hill Revelation, all under 10%.
Five Nights at Freddy’s 2
Rotten Tomatoes
So, why do audiences love the movie and critics hate it? Well, it’s made for FNAF fans, and those fans only. Given that this same thing happened last time and the original Five Nights at Freddy’s made $297 million on a $20 million budget, it does not matter in the least what critics think. The first movie opened with an $80,000 opening weekend, as well, quadrupling its budget in three days.
I don’t expect Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 to earn more than the original, as I think there was something more novel about the adaptation being the first time it was happening (plus it’s dealing with the fallout of Zootopia 2). But I do expect it to make a bunch of money and multiply whatever its budget is this time several times over.
Just for fun, let’s read some of what critics are saying about the film:
- Guardian – “By all evidence, Cawthon is singularly unqualified to write towards human experiences that aren’t marble-mouthed attempts at references.”
- The Wrap – “The script is the quintessence of lead. It lumbers from functional scene to functional scene at a golem’s pace with a dismissal of logic that borders on the contemptuous — or the insane.”
- Variety – “A supernatural video-game slasher movie of astonishing clunky crudeness. No, the movie isn’t dumb fun. It’s flat-out bad, maybe even worse than the first film.”
Yeah, none of this matters. I can guarantee 98% of the people attending this film have not read a single one of these reviews, and if they liked the first one, they’ll show up here, for the most part. We’ll see how it does this weekend.
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Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2025/12/05/five-nights-at-freddys-2-has-a-double-take-rotten-tomatoes-score/
