The third Five Nights at Freddy’s movie is getting a fresh creative voice behind the keyboard. Gary Dauberman has signed on to write the screenplay, taking over scripting duties from franchise creator Scott Cawthon, who built the whole haunted pizzeria empire from a single indie horror game.
That’s a notable shift. Cawthon co-wrote the first film alongside Emma Tammi and Seth Cuddeback, then handled the second film’s script solo. For the third entry, he steps back from the page — but not out of the building. He stays on as a producer, keeping a hand on the franchise’s mythology while someone else does the actual world-building on the page.
If Dauberman’s name rings a bell, it should. He’s one of the more reliable architects of modern studio horror, and his arrival signals that Blumhouse and Atomic Monster want a writer fluent in the genre’s mechanics rather than someone learning on the job. It’s a pragmatic move: the FNAF films have already proven they can draw a crowd, and a seasoned horror scribe is exactly the kind of hire you make when you’re trying to keep a hit series sharp instead of stale.
Behind the camera, continuity looks intact. Emma Tammi, who directed the first two installments and co-wrote the original, is expected to return to direct. That pairing — an established horror screenwriter with the director who already understands the franchise’s tone — is the kind of combination studios chase when a property is doing well and they’d rather not gamble on reinvention.
The handover was announced on June 26-27, 2026, and the project is aiming for a late 2027 release. That said, the film has not locked in an official release date window yet, so the 2027 target remains a moving target rather than a fixed point on the calendar.
What this means for the story itself is anyone’s guess. Dauberman inheriting the script from Cawthon raises the obvious question of how faithfully the new film will hew to the games’ notoriously dense, fan-decoded lore — the sort of timeline puzzles that FNAF devotees have spent years untangling. With Cawthon producing rather than writing, there’s a balance to strike between honoring that canon and giving a new screenwriter room to maneuver.
For now, the essentials are simple: a new writer, a returning director, the franchise’s creator overseeing from the producer’s chair, and a tentative late-2027 window. The animatronics, presumably, will be ready whenever the cameras are.
