Hello and welcome to Into the Night, a Five Nights at Freddy's podcast.

I am your host, Nick, and thank you for listening.

It has been about a month now since the release of what might be the most for the fans film ever produced.

And to say the response hasn't been polarizing would be an understatement.

Finance of Freddy's 2 has received a decidedly mixed reception.

Most critics have dismissed it outright as poor filmmaking, while a significant portion

of the fandom has praised it as

excellent, at least excellent for what it set out to be.

Yet when shifting through the broader online discourse throughout the month, the prevailing

sentiment seems to land somewhere in the middle.

Frankly, after now watching it a third time, I think I can officially label the film as

average to mediocre.

Personally, I think it's difficult to ignore how much the film's more charitable reception

may stem from the broader state of modern

Hollywood.

When so much contemporary output feels creatively bankrupt, a movie that would have been considered

merely above average in the mid-2000s or early 2010s can appear, by comparison, like a diamond in the rough in the 2020s.

I mean, clearly even I found myself shifting opinions over time with this film, initially

rating the film a 4 out of 10, then a 6 out of 10 on a second viewing, and ultimately

I've settled somewhere in the middle, acknowledging both the film's deeply flawed creative decisions and my own unavoidable bias as a longtime FNAF fan.

And that bias, the extinctive dismissal of criticism towards something you've come to identify as part of yourself, has become an increasingly

prominent issue with the fanatic community with this film.

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