If you've been paying attention to the Five Nights at Freddy's film saga, you'd know the whole thing was a development nightmare that made watching paint dry look exciting. Well, a YouTube DIY channel has just dug up a relic from the early years that shows how wildly different the final film could have been.
The folks at Geek Garage recently gave away a very early screenplay signed by Matthew Lillard as part of a Patreon giveaway. According to Bill and Andrea from the channel, who worked in the film industry before pivoting to YouTube content, the screenplay was written by Gil Kenan and Tyler Burton Smith sometime between 2015 and 2017.
The story followed a group of four nerdy friends who called themselves 'The Warlocks' and made YouTube videos together, who stumble upon the story of a dead security guard and five missing children, then decide to sneak out to the old abandoned pizzeria to investigate what really happened. Sound familiar? It should. The early version had more of a group vibe like The Goonies or Stranger Things with a pretty conventional setup and lacked real faithfulness to the source material and FNAF lore, and there was no William Afton in the script at all.
That last bit is worth sitting with for a second. The villain of the entire franchise, gone. Replaced by what? According to the notes from Geek Garage, the owner was a totally different character. The script apparently also featured an underground workshop and even an underground amusement park, plus a protagonist dealing with family upheaval and a single mum, hitting some pretty familiar storytelling beats.
Now here's where it gets interesting. The FNAF movie production was needlessly convoluted; the movie was announced in 2015 to be produced by Warner Bros. with series creator Scott Cawthon involved, but two years later the movie rights were turned over to Blumhouse right before Cawthon announced the project was cancelled (he was just trolling). That Kenan and Smith screenplay was part of the Warner Bros. era, when nobody quite knew what to do with the property.
By the time Blumhouse took over in March 2017, the creative direction started shifting hard. The film went through numerous iterations and drafts, with Cawthon scrapping versions that didn't fit his vision. Eventually, Emma Tammi was announced as director in October 2022, co-writing the screenplay alongside Cawthon and Seth Cuddeback. And the rest, as they say, is history; the film was released on October 27, 2023.
The catch, naturally, is that we won't be seeing much more of this early "Warlocks" draft. Geek Garage and the screenplay recipient understandably wish to avoid copyright infringement and won't be discussing the script any further, saying "We're not gatekeeping, we're just following the law".
Look, here's the thing about development hell in Hollywood: sometimes those scrapped versions teach us more about a film than the final product does. This "Warlocks" screenplay is a perfect example of how a property can pull in completely different directions depending on who's steering. Would a Stranger Things-flavoured FNAF movie with a teen mystery squad have worked? Mate, your guess is as good as mine. But it certainly would've been a different beast entirely from the final film starring Josh Hutcherson as a troubled security guard who discovers the animatronic mascots are possessed by the spirits of murdered children.