The release of the long-awaited movie based on the hit video game franchise means Five Nights at Freddy’s Fever is raging all over again, as Freddy Fazbear and his animatronic serial killer cronies finally make the leap to the screen. This might be the first official adaptation of the IP, but believe it or not, Disney accidentally came very close to making their own version of FNAF a decade ago.
Supernaturally possessed animatronic puppets — Chuck E. Cheese meets Chucky from Child’s Play — is such a uniquely demented concept you’d think it’d be impossible that two different creators would have the idea independently of the other. And yet that’s exactly what happened in the early 2010s. While FNAF creator Scott Cawthon was busy developing the first game behind closed doors, the showrunner of a beloved Disney Channel animated series dreamed up the exact same concept.
Gravity Falls and Five Nights at Freddy’s had the same plot and released one month apart
If you catch Gravity Falls these days, when you reach season 2’s “Soos and the Real Girl” it’s easy to assume that it’s a cheeky riff on Five Night’s at Freddy’s, as the episode’s third act revolves around the animatronic puppets of a family restaurant coming to life after they are possessed by a malevolent force. Congrats to the team for sneaking the plot past the Disney censors, but it’s hardly an original idea, right?
Actually, the episode had its first airing on The Disney Channel in September 2014, just one month after FNAF released in August that same year. So, yes, while it did come out after the game, naturally it was written and animated long before Freddy’s made its impact on pop culture. Gravity Falls creator Alex Hirsch has been fielding questions about the episode’s connections to the game ever since, even though he long ago confirmed the similar premises are a total coincidence.
“Somebody was playing 5 Nights at Freddy’s before writing this episode,” Hirsch quoted someone as saying on Twitter in 2014. “We wrote this episode a year before that came out.”
On the audio commentary for the episode on the Gravity Falls Blu-ray release, Hirsch elaborated on the novelty of the two near-identical stories coming out so close together. As for how they cooked up the same idea, Hirsch suggested that he and Cawthon are simply part of the same generation who grew up with such restaurants and both found them ripe to be twisted in a darker direction.
The Five Nights at Freddy’s movie hits theaters and streaming on Oct. 27, while Gravity Falls can be found on Disney Plus.