Five Nights at Freddy's director Emma Tammi reveals the movie's secret timeline, and it's a slight diversion from the first video game.
Summary
- The Five Nights at Freddy's movie is set in the early 2000s, showcasing family entertainment centers like Freddy Fazbear's Pizza that were popular during that time.
- The movie's timeline is different from the video game's timeline, with the game taking place thirty years after the pizzeria closed in the early 1990s.
- The movie introduces a new storyline, where Mike's brother is abducted, leading to a delay in the timeline to the early 2000s instead of the 1990s.
Five Nights at Freddy's director Emma Tammi reveals the movie's secret timeline. Based on the video game franchise created by Scott Cawthon, who also co-wrote the script, the movie adaptation follows a troubled security guard working the nighttime shift at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, where four animatronic mascots come alive and kill anyone who is there after midnight. Josh Hutcherson leads the Five Nights at Freddy's cast alongside Elizabeth Lail, Piper Rubio, Mary Stuart Masterson, and Matthew Lillard.
During a recent interview with Uproxx, Tammi revealed exactly when the Five Nights at Freddy's movie takes place. Although "it’s not in your face and it’s easy to miss," the director says the movie is set during the year 2000, and went on to explain the creative decision. Read her full comments below:
We were hovering around the year 2000. Obviously, there was a lot going on with Y2K then, and so we didn’t want to be right on the cusp of that because that felt like such a big moment and that wasn’t the focus of our story in any way. But just over the hurdle of that and doing the math backwards from when generally the pizzeria would’ve opened and when it would’ve closed and when Mike’s brother would’ve been abducted. So, really, just piecing together a rough timeline landed us around the year 2000.
The Five Nights At Freddy's Movie Timeline Explained
It makes sense that the Five Nights at Freddy's movie takes place during the early 2000s, as opposed to the modern day. A few decades ago, family entertainment centers like the fictional Freddy Fazbear's Pizza were still popular, based on the real chain Chuck E. Cheese, which has largely discontinued its animatronic shows and has declined in popularity in recent years. By the time the movie begins in the early 2000s, the eponymous entertainment center is already abandoned, and it's up to the new security guard Mike Schmidt (Josh Hutcherson) to uncover what happened at Freddy's years ago.
Similarly, the first Five Nights at Freddy's video game takes place 30 years after the pizzeria closed its doors, putting the present-day timeline somewhere in the early 1990s. The video game also mentions an incident known as the "The Bite of '87," which is what led to the restaurant's four animatronics – Freddy Fazbear, Bonnie, Chica, and Foxy – being locked up during the day. In a diversion from the games, Mike's brother was abducted in the Five Nights at Freddy's movie, which is perhaps why the timeline was delayed to the early 2000s instead of the 1990s.
Source: Uproxx
