It’s fun to tease Blumhouse Productions for giving up the ghost on its big reveal, but we also have to be honest with ourselves because no version of this story sees the studio getting away with hiding William Afton behind a fake name. The fanbase for “Five Nights at Freddy’s” is, well, let’s say, dedicated to discovery. Consider this: The “FNAF” video game franchise owes no small portion of its fame to YouTube, where let’s-play channels, like Markiplier, and lore/theory channels, like The Game Theorists, brought Scott Cawthon’s creation into the spotlight for millions upon millions of gamers.
Matthew Patrick, aka MatPat of The Game Theorists, is a solid reference point for how most “FNAF” fans approach the series. On his channel, the standard practice is to dissect every frame of footage and every line of dialogue, read every ancillary book, and play every ancillary game for clues about the larger narrative. He’s not the only one who does this for a massive following, but he is one of the most prominent to do so, and he’s one of the only YouTubers who landed a cameo in the film, so he’s the one who gets mentioned here.
Now, imagine legions of fans, all pouring through the trailers, all picking apart the cast and crew members’ social media posts, all scouring the internet for accidental information. How was Blumhouse ever going to compete with that? They weren’t, and they couldn’t, and at some point, they must have accepted it. Otherwise, why let such an obvious spoiler make it into the final cut of the opening credits?
