Home Alone director departs delayed Five Nights at Freddy's movie
"I don't have the right to do anything Scott doesn't like," producer says.
A film version of hugely-popular horror franchise Five Nights at Freddy's has been delayed due to controversial creator Scott Cawthon, and the project's director has now left.
Harry Potter and Home Alone director Chris Colombus was on board to direct the FNAF film adaptation, which was set to begin shooting in spring this year.
But a Collider interview with Jason Blum, boss of production company Blumhouse, has revealed the movie is being held up while Cawthon continues to disagree on a script.
"We've written multiple scripts, and we've got where we're threading a needle, which is doing justice to Five Nights at Freddy's and making Scott happy," Blum said. "The only way that we would go about it is giving Scott... I don't want to do something that Scott doesn't like.
"Let me say that a different way. I don't have the right to do anything Scott doesn't like. Basically, Scott has kind of like the equivalent of 'final cut' and it's taken longer than I hoped to get the right story."
Blum also confirmed that director Chris Columbus was "no longer attached" and that whether a new director had been brought on board was "classified information".
It's odd to hear Cawthorn's issues with the film's script are still impacting production. Last November, Cawthon said he had passed on nine screenplays "from big studios, some from big directors, some from me and some from other hired writers" but had ultimately settled on a draft which would be made.
This screenplay "makes sense" and had "the best pieces from all the previous screenplays", Cawthon said, including "all the right characters, all the right motivations, all the right stakes".
"Filming starts in spring!!! :D" Cawthon concluded.
In June this year Cawthon sparked criticism after he confirmed that he had financially backed a number of US Republican candidates, including former US president Donald Trump. Cawthon spoke out on the matter, addressing "people from the LGBT community in the fanbase that I love".
"Even if there were candidates who had better things to say to the LGBT community directly, and bigger promises to make, I believed that their stances on other issues would have ended up doing much greater harm to those communities than good," Cawthon wrote at the time.