TheFive Nights At Freddy’sHall H Panel at last weekend’s San Diego Comic-Con was of little substance. ProducerJason Blum, along with director Emma Tammi, returning cast members Josh Hutcherson and Piper Rubio, and a few others took the stage on Friday afternoon to deliver the briefest of previews for the upcoming sequel and answer questions about FNAF lore, or at least attempted to.
Unsurprisingly, Hall H was completely packed with Freddy’s fans. Devotees of the video game series turned up in droves for the original FNAF film, turning the $20 million project into a $290 million worldwide success. Its financial success is in sharp contrast to its critical reception however. With 32 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and 33 percent on Metacritic, FNAF ranks in the bottom 20 of Blumhouse’s 104 films. This is a fact that doesn’t seem to be lost on Blum or the cast.
Blum, who has built his empire on long-running horror series like The Purge, Paranormal Activity, and Insidious, hopes to continue the Freddy’s series for as long as possible. Blumhouse has something to prove with Five Nights At Freddy’s 2, and while there was plenty of hype at the SDCC panel, there was also a whiff of desperation in the air. Fans, especially the younger fans who grew up withFazbear, are a fickle bunch, so Blumhouse seems well aware that this time, it has to get FNAF right.
M3GAN Syndrome
It’s not hard to understand why Blumhouse isn’t treating FNAF 2 like a guaranteed hit. Its 2022 sci-fi horror film M3GAN found similar success to Freddy’s, taking a $12 million budget and returning $180 million worldwide. M3GAN was a financial victory and a cultural phenomenon, but when the sequel premiered last month, audiences didn’t show up.
To date, M3GAN 2.0 has grossed just $38 million worldwide, barely exceeding its projected $25 million budget, and likely to come up short once marketing costs are accounted for. Blum has spoken openly about the box office failure of the sequel,telling The Townpodcast that the opening weekend projections sent him into “a death spiral of depression.”
Blum says they overestimated how invested audiences were in M3GAN, believing they could put her in a new genre and change her from a villain to a hero and people would still show up. That evidently wasn’t the case, and after a string of flops throughout 2025, it seems like Blum is approaching FNAF 2 with some much-needed caution.
Giving Fans What They Want
Unlike M3GAN, Freddy’s does already have a large and loyal fan base. A lot of the people who helped the first film reach nearly $300 million grew up with the games and are invested in the series’ deep lore. That topic was frequently addressed throughout the panel, with both cast and crew acknowledging how much the fans care about the intricacies of the story and its many animatronic characters.
Hutcherson was a bit more candid about his obliviousness to the lore, but defended it as a character choice. 12-year-old Rubio is unsurprisingly the de facto story expert on the team, and any time she started rattling off names of side characters or recounting plot points, the audience sat captivated.
It was also stated repeatedly that the studio is taking feedback from the first film seriously. Blum said this specifically, while Matthew Lillard (in a pre-recorded video) promised the sequel is going to be great because Blumhouse really listened to what fans want. We’ve got hints of some of the characters from the game that will be appearing in FNAF 2, like Mangled and Withered Bonnie, which were created by Henson Creature Company to ensure authenticity.
Five Nights At Freddy’s 2 will either be the beginning or the end of Blumhouse’s FNAF series, and the studio seems to be aware that fandom alone won’t carry this one across the finish line. Let’s hope Blum is right and the sequel delivers the story fans want to see when it premieres this November.
