Five Nights at Freddy’s, the massively popular indie horror series, has been working on a film adaptation for a long time. Fans have been waiting for news on a release date, but recently it’s been revealed that the film’s director, Chris Columbus, has left the team.

Chris Columbus has been the director of the FNAF movie since 2018, but this film’s story has a little more to it than that. According to PC Games, the rights to the film were bought by Warner Bros. way back in 2015, just a year after the very first FNAF game launched, and Blumhouse Productions got involved in 2017. After that, things went practically radio silent until series creator Scott Cawthon cheekily uploaded a Reddit post titled “Bad news about the FNAF movie:” A post which ended up (plot twist) confirming that the movie had a script and was headed into production. Cawthon even described the new script as having “all the right characters, all the right motivations, [and] all the right stakes,” which will be important in just a second here.

More recently, however, Blumhouse CEO Jason Blum sat down with Collider and revealed that the movie had lost its’ director, among… other issues: Chiefly among those being making Scott Cawthon happy. Remember when Cawthon made his post saying that the film’s script had “all the right characters, all the right motivations, [and] all the right stakes?” Well, according to Blum, not only is the film’s script not finished: Cawthorn is still actively asking for rewrites. He describes the process of drafting the film’s script as “threading a needle” between “doing justice to Five Nights at Freddy’s and making Scott [Cawthon] happy.”

I don’t want to do something that Scott doesn’t like. Let me say that a different way. I don’t have the right to do anything Scott doesn’t like.

He did end the interview on a positive note, saying that the team is “a long way from giving up,” but it’s clear that things aren’t going as smoothly as intended. All this is stacked on top of Cawthon’s leaked political donations, revealing that he’s donated thousands of dollars to politicians actively working to discriminate against the LGBTQIA+ community, which he “apologized” for (that’s not a quote, he just didn’t really apologize) in yet another Reddit post. In the post, Cawthon effectively retires from the gaming industry and pledges his support of the FNAF community whether it includes him or not.

Regardless, the Five Night’s at Freddy’s movie is still happening but has no release date at the time of writing.