Five Nights at Freddy’s and 10 Other Movies that Missed the Hype
Eight years ago, Warner Bros. acquired the rights to adapt Five Nights at Freddy’s, a viral-friendly horror videogame where haunted animatronics haunt a night-time employee of a Chuck E. Cheese-esque restaurant. Then, only a year after its release, the game had hype that WB hoped to capitalize on. Five Nights at Freddy’s was not compelling because of its narrative, but despite the gimmicky nature of its thrills, it enjoyed a longer-than-most longevity that was propelled by the YouTube/Twitch gameplay industry where players can exaggerate their scared reactions. But creative roadblocks came during the adaptation process, with multiple drafts, directions and directors being announced and abandoned up until filming commenced in February 2023 (also, the release of multiple non-licensed horror films riding Five Nights at Freddy’s coattails). The film is finally out this week. While it’s definitely good to know that Jason Blum can still pulp out a buzzy horror movie in under a year, Five Nights at Freddy’s gestation period means the movie missed the hype on a game that took the internet by storm nearly a decade ago. It wouldn’t be the first time Hollywood was slow off the mark, though.
Here are the 10 biggest movies that missed the hype:
1. Masters of the Universe (1987)
A little bit of free market He-Man history: Even though toy sales were strong up until 1987, the market had become saturated with ugly derivations of fan-favorite toys and waves of new characters. The cartoon had ended in 1985, the intrusion of Transformers and especially Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles later in the ‘80s meant that the exact conditions of unregulated child marketing that created Mattel’s initial He-Man success dried up pretty quickly. Cannon Films had a perfect set-up to bomb the franchise with a slap-dash film that stumbled into cinemas and bore little resemblance to the stories beloved by kids—even Mattel had so little faith that they didn’t pay the arranged production costs on time. It may have only missed the hype by a couple years, but in Reaganist terms that’s a fatal mistake.
2. The Garbage Pail Kids Movie (1987)
A clear case of not just missing the hype but also the point: The Garbage Pail Kids Movie has a reputation for being the most unwatchable movies released by Hollywood. Based on the Topps trading cards parodying the Cabbage Patch Kids dolls (to the point of being sued by the company they were parodying), the best time to make a weird kids movie based on this nasty, cartoon artwork was never; the second best time was the moment they became popular and not a millisecond after. The cards were only originally available for three years—they are the dictionary definition of a fad, one that loses its natural hype as soon as studios invest $1 million into asserting how relevant and cool they are.
3. Borderlands (2024)
This is slightly cheating because the movie has not been completed or released yet, but we need to take this opportunity to explain how doomed this videogame adaptation will be. You know you’re onto some missed hype gold dust if the “Production” tab on Wikipedia for an still-unreleased film begins with “In May 2015…” This may go down as one of the most troubled Hollywood productions in recent memory, with reshoots with a different director (Tim Miller) and eight additional writers contributing to the script, including Sam Levinson and Craig Mazin, the latter of which has chosen to be credited under a pseudonym. The kicker? Borderlands hype has cooled off since the release of Borderlands 3 in 2019. A great example of production delays worsening a movie’s relevancy before it’s even out.
4. The Lone Ranger (2013)
You remember The Lone Ranger TV series? The Western serial from the literal ‘50s with all the queasy Native American representation? Well, at least the show cast an actual Indigenous person in the role of Tonto, despite Jay Silverheels being Indigenous Canadian and not Native American. (Tonto has been from one of three different Native tribes—either Tonto Apache, Comanche or Potawatomi—just to demonstrate how thoughtfully writers considered and still consider Native representation.) Anyways, Johnny Depp is not Indigenous in any way, and is paired with Armie Hammer in this oversized Gore Verbinski blockbuster for a dynamic duo of scumbag leading men. The Lone Ranger is a victim of its own scale; if this film was made in the ‘80s alongside other ‘50s nostalgia-driven projects, it wouldn’t have cost $400 million before it opened, and they’d have a much easier job convincing contemporary audiences to give a damn about the property—maybe because they’d know what it is?
