Five Nights at Freddy's 2 is one of the worst-rated movies of the year just like Borderlands was last year
Sigh. We were so close, y'all. For a moment, I was sure that videogame movies were finally capable of being not terrible—then I remembered that 2023 cursed us with that Gran Turismo movie, but you know. Unfortunately, the last 12 months seems to have thrown us straight back to the '90s with terrible silver screen adaptations. And the mascot standing strong as the representative of bad videogame movies is none other than Freddy Fazbear himself.
As reported by TheGamer, Five Nights at Freddy's 2 currently stands as one of the worst-rated movie releases of 2025. That's right, it's not just a terrible adaptation, it's seemingly a terrible movie full stop.
It's currently positioned as the third worst film out of the 429 with more than seven critic reviews on Metacritic this year, with a measly aggregation of just 26 out of 100. It's only three points better than Bride Hard but still miles (20 points) better than the current worst-rated film of the year—War of the Worlds, which from what I have been told is an awful lot of Ice Cube staring at screens peppered in with some not-so-subtle Amazon product placement.
I've yet to see the Five Nights at Freddy's sequel, but its poor reception does not exactly surprise me. The first film seemed to be a great romp for fans—which, as someone who only understood the MatPat cameo, I am not—but wasn't exactly the best piece of cinema outside its plethora of references.
The A.V. Club positively ripped FNAF 2 to shreds, writing: "Its entire third act is just expectation for a third movie that hopefully never comes. It is a bare minimum branding experiment, a dumb thing designed to be recognized with the hope that enjoyment will simply follow." Simon Abrams for RogerEbert had a more positive outlook: "Five Nights at Freddy's 2 not only has a more involved story, but also features more engaged filmmaking throughout, with more camera setups and visual brio."
FNAF 2 follows in the footsteps of last year's Borderlands movie, which also ended up as the third-worst movie on Metacritic. Despite a relatively weak year for videogame movies all round, other adaptations have fared better in the site's aggregation—A Minecraft Movie was the 384th best movie with a Metascore of 45, while Until Dawn and TRON: Ares fared slightly better at 367 and 368 with a Metascore of 47 and 48 respectively.
On the bright side, it's been a mostly decent year for videogames making their way over to television. Fallout Season 2 is off to a fantastic start with plenty of positive critic reviews including our own from Jody. The Last of Us Season 2 was received with similar heapings of praise from critics, sitting at 92% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.
I'm currently wrapping up the first season of the Devil May Cry anime on Netflix—a second one is in the works for next May—and while I don't love it (it feels more like Adi Shankar wanted to make an eight-episode AMV most of the time) it's still watchable. More than what can seemingly be said for many of the above.
Will 2026 put Hollywood back in our good gaming graces? The Super Mario Galaxy movie makes me want to say yes. But, er, whatever the hell is going on with the Street Fighter movie is most certainly putting a big fat nope on all of that right now. At least for me, anyway. If that thing's gonna be as big a mess as I predict, let's at least hope it's a fun mess.