Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is officially out in theaters, and reviews are finally coming in for the horror sequel. The Rotten Tomatoes score for the film has dropped, and it’s a drastic about-face from the original’s score.
Rotten Tomatoes Score Is Much Lower Than Original
Reviews for Universal and Blumhouse’s PG-13 sequel were embargoed right up until its premiere in North American cinemas on Thursday night; and seeing the final score, it makes sense why the studios wanted to hold reviews until the last minute. As of Dec. 5, the day of its release, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 holds a frightfully low 11 percent critical consensus on Rotten Tomatoes. That’s even lower than the original’s still-low (but now relatively high) critical consensus of 33 percent.
Critics Have Slammed the ‘Crude’ Filmmaking
Reviews for Emma Tammi’s sequel, which returns original stars Josh Hutcherson and Elizabeth Lail to do battle with the titular pizzeria’s cadre of improbably animated electronic mascots, have been catastrophic, to say the least. Owen Gleiberman, writing for Variety, called Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 “a supernatural video-game slasher movie of astonishing clunky crudeness.” “It’s flat-out bad, maybe even worse than the first film,” Gleiberman wrote in an opinion clearly shared by his peers. Tammi “stages the violence in such an innocuous way that you feel like you’re watching some bowdlerized network-TV version of a horror film, with the good parts cut out.”
The Hollywood Reporter’s Frank Scheck called Freddy’s 2 “a wholly unnecessary sequel” that “should be skipped.” The picture “really piles on the jump scares, mainly achieved by sudden bursts of deafening volume that the sound engineers of Spinal Tap would envy. You can’t blame her, since game creator Scott Cawthon has once again provided a screenplay layered with laborious supernatural elements and apparently enough Easter eggs to excite faithful gamers while meaning absolutely nothing to everyone else.”
Criticism Is Unlikely to Deter Fans
But if the original movie is any indication, Five Nights at Freddy’s fans won’t be bothered by many of the issues which have so incensed critics. Despite the first film’s 33 percent critical consensus, it climbed to an 86 percent audience score. While the audience score for Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 hasn’t been tabulated yet (that’ll have to wait until a day or two after its general release), it seems likely that it will at least be higher than 11 percent.
Universal/Blumhouse
The Original Was an Unprecedented Success
Five Nights at Freddy’s shocked the industry, and even some of the franchise’s most ardent supporters, when it opened to a superlative $80 million in North America. The picture went on to gross nearly $300 million on a budget of just $20 million. Early tracking for the sequel indicates that it won’t open to nearly as high a number, with analysts predicting it’ll take somewhere between $35 million and $40 million in its opening frame.
Unlike the original, which opened on the Friday before Halloween back in 2023 and faced little competition at the box office, Freddy’s 2 is expected to lose the top spot to Disney’s holiday release Zootopia 2, which is holding strong in its second weekend. Still, with a reported budget of under $40 million, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 should have little problem making its money back. Whether it will turn a healthy profit, however, remains to be seen.
