Warning: Contains spoilers for Five Nights at Freddy’s 2!

Welcome back to Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza! After two years, the sequel to the milestone of a movie Five Nights at Freddy’s has just dropped into theaters on December 5th, 2025. Like its predecessor, it’s based on the eponymous game of the now-iconic franchise, set a year after its events.

The film starts off in 1982, at the flagship Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. At the edge of the showstage, a girl, Charlotte Emily, played by Audrey Lynn-Marie, sits waiting for the Marionette to emerge from its trapdoor. Her friend Vanessa Afton, played by Miriam Spumpkin as a child and Elizabeth Lail as an adult, tries to coax her to come back to the birthday party, but Charlotte spots a child being led away by a man, now known today as William Afton, in a yellow rabbit costume. Against Vanessa’s wishes, Charlotte, after being turned away from several parents, follows the Yellow Rabbit and saves the boy, but not before the Rabbit manages to stab and kill the girl. As the customers watch, the Marionette rises from the pit, clutching Charlotte’s body. Twenty years later, Mike Schmidt, played by Josh Hutcherson, and his sister Abby, played by Piper Rubio, deal with the aftermath of the first film while Vanessa struggles with PTSD from her father’s actions. When Abby sneaks to the abandoned flagship Freddy’s location to find her animatronic friends, she inadvertently helps release the Toy animatronics, all controlled wirelessly by Charlotte’s vengeful spirit possessing the Marionette. The animatronics rampage through town during a Fazfest celebration, targeting the parents who ignored Charlotte’s cries for help twenty years ago, while paranormal investigators are brutally killed at the flagship location by the mysterious night guard Michael revealed to be Vanessa’s brother continuing their father’s murderous legacy. Mike and Vanessa must team up with the original animatronic souls one final time to stop the Marionette-controlled massacre, ultimately defeating Michael and saving Abby, though the victory comes at a cost: the original souls ascend to the afterlife warning that Afton will return, Vanessa becomes possessed by the Marionette after Mike cuts ties with her, and a post-credits scene shows Afton’s corpse reactivating inside the decayed Spring Bonnie suit while Henry Emily’s warning about the Marionette is cut short by the entity attacking him.

Overall, FNaF 2 is a marked improvement over the first movie, at least when it comes to the gameplay features and the creep factor. Despite it being yet another rather underwhelming thriller film, it manages to take the two main complaints of the first film and improve them quite a bit. For instance, Mike working a “shift” in the office helping to track down the Toys is eerily similar to the second game’s actual gameplay, except for the fact that the Toys were still within the pizzeria the entirety of the game. The Marionette being calmed down by a music box and Mike fending off all of the Withered animatronics bar Foxy with a spare Freddy head are key mechanics of the second game, and the security office itself, as well as Withered Freddy’s pose when he’s in it for the first time, is painstakingly replicated perfectly in the film adaptation. Meanwhile, the creep factor has been cranked up in comparison to its predecessor. There were a lot more scenes that made me physically jump, like the Marionette dolls in the river ride and the abrupt reveal of the Withered bots, and the tenseness of Vanessa’s dream alone leaks out a lot more than the suspenseful scenes in FNaF 1.

Being a lifelong FNaF fan, I’m a lot more forgiving than most other critics when it comes to this film. However, that doesn’t excuse the fact that this film was a bit clunkier than I would have liked. The storyline, while incredibly faithful to the limited lore we get from the second game, connects a little bit too loosely to the first film. While I think it’s insanely cool that we actually get voice actors for the Toy animatronics this time around, how they talk makes them seem a little too cartoony for vengeance-filled robots, and I honestly think it would have been better to keep them mute, like the first film. However, my biggest peeve with this film is that the Withereds barely get any screen time. These guys are the main reason why I got excited over this film, especially with how much they were advertised, but in the actual film they only got one action scene for themselves. Most notoriously, Withered Bonnie only gets seen activating, then crawling in the vent outside of the office, and that’s it. All of the things we see of him in the trailers? That’s it. Nada. Zilch. Sayonara. I mean, what the heck is the point of hyping us up if that’s all we were going to see of these guys? I mean, they try to cover it up by using the originals in the final confrontation scene, but I gotta be honest, I kind of would have preferred the souls possess the Withereds, and have the originals actually be destroyed in the first movie’s cave-in. It fits in a lot better for the lamp stands we can see in the FNaF 3 game, and gives the Withereds a lot more of their anticipated screentime. Also, that final confrontation? Very anticlimactic. Each Toy animatronic gets dismantled way too easily for my liking.

That’s not to say that everything else about this movie is bad though. The casting, surprisingly, is one of my favorite parts of FNaF 2. Usually I never care much about the cast for a sequel film; it’s usually just the same guys doing something different this time around. However, FNaF 2 has managed to bring in a dream team in horror: Matthew Lillard, who’s already been here as the big bad Afton, and now Skeet Ulrich as Henry Emily. For those of you who don’t know, this is not the first time Ulrich and Lillard have been together for a horror film: the most famous team-up we have of them so far is actually the first 1996 Scream film, where they portray both faces of the mass-murderer Ghostface. The fact that we have the so-called Scream Kings together again, as partners and co-creators of Freddy’s no less, just stands out. Then, the animatronic voice actors themselves are another all-star group: Toy Freddy is Kellen Goff, who’s pretty much a no-brainer thanks to his voicing practically almost every Freddy Fazbear in existence (which explains why this version of Toy Freddy sounds like his Glamrock counterpart in Security Breach), and Toy Chica Megan Fox, who has had a great spread of acting roles across her career. However, most importantly is MatPat’s Toy Bonnie. This marks the second time MatPat has appeared in a FNaF film, and this time, instead of being a waiter, he’s a full blown animatronic! His voice acting for the plastic bunny is spot-on as well; he perfectly emulates the squeaky, high-pitched voice Bonnie had in his sole speaking role in FNaF: Special Delivery–so well, in fact, you can’t even tell it’s the former Game Theory host.

Then, of course, because this is a game adaptation and a sequel to a film, there’s bound to be several easter eggs scattered liberally across the movie. Most importantly, Circus Baby. For some lore foreshadowing reason, the main antagonist of the fifth entry of the game series appears in Vanessa’s dream, which is honestly kind of fitting. Baby’s notorious for capturing and killing Afton’s daughter Elizabeth in the games, where the soul of the girl takes control of the animatronic. This was definitely a surprise to see; I wasn’t expecting her to show up so soon in the universe. This isn’t the only easter egg we’ve got here; when Mike lets Abby get a piece of merchandise back at the FNaF 1 location, he squeezes a Freddy plushy that lets fly the now-quintessential FNaF beatbox meme that definitely cracked me up. Then, in the opening 1982 scene, two arcades boasting the titular characters of the fangames Five Nights at Candy’s and Popgoes can be seen, a nod to their inclusion to the Fazbear Fanverse Initiative, a selection of popular fanmade FNaF games taken from the expansive library of tributary recreations out there. Finally, when Mike is working the night shift, a silhouette of Toy Bonnie with glowing eyes and teeth can be seen in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, but disappears when Mike shines his flashlight over it. This is supposed to be RWQFSFASXC, or Shadow Bonnie, a hallucination that can be found in the second game that crashes your game if you look at him too long in your office.

Overall, while it’s definitely not perfect, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 might be my favorite film out of the two so far. While it may be clunkier than I would have liked, and there’s definitely a lot I want changed, I’d say this was a good second try at making the hit horror game a movie, and it’s definitely hyped me up for FNaF 3.