I wasn’t at New York Comic Con this year, but I could feel a wave of awkwardness reverberating from the Javits Center in my Brooklyn apartment like a disturbance in the Force. It wasn’t until videos of one of the most uncomfortable convention panels I’ve ever seen started circulating online that I knew the source of this sudden secondhand embarrassment. Participants in the Blumhouse panel, also known as Blumfest, talked a bit about the upcoming Five Nights at Freddy’s sequel before revealing that Megan Fox, of Transformers and Jennifer’s Body fame, would be voicing Toy Chica, the evil animatronic bird, in the live-action follow-up. This was met with an underwhelming response from the crowd, and oof, it is a brutal watch.
I have no stake in the Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 cast, but I do understand why Fox’s casting might not elicit an enthusiastic response from the crowd. Fox’s voice acting in Mortal Kombat 1 was atrocious, and it also wouldn’t surprise me if some of the FNAF fandom doesn’t have a strong association with her, given the series has a pretty young fanbase and the actor was most prominent in Hollywood well over a decade ago. But the crowd at the Comic Con panel could barely muster up a polite cheer. Instead, Fox’s announcement is met with some murmurs and a few claps, but mostly deafening silence.
The panelists try to hype up the announcement by saying her name, almost as if they fear people don’t recognize her from the photo alone, and then you can hear some people in the crowd laughing at how uncomfortable it is. Whether or not Fox actually pulls off the role remains to be seen, but the whole thing feels like a miscalculation of both the crowd’s enthusiasm and, perhaps, Fox’s cultural cache. Five Nights at Freddy’s fans are notoriously protective of its characters, so we’ll see how they react to her performance when the movie premieres on December 5.
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