Finding Frankie: The Netflix K-Drama Everyone’s Comparing It To — Can You Guess Which One?
Finding Frankie is the next video game leveling up to the big screen, with Under Fire director Steven C. Miller at the helm. Cory Todd Hughes and Adrian Speckert are scripting, with Sean Robins producing alongside 13 Films and So It Goes Entertainment.
Another video game is making the jump to the big screen, and this one is a gnarly mash-up of sugar-cereal nostalgia and run-for-your-life chaos. Finding Frankie, the indie parkour horror hit, is getting a film adaptation. On paper, it sounds like a crowd-pleaser. In execution? That depends on how much broken glass you like in your Saturday morning cartoons.
Who is turning Finding Frankie into a movie
- Producer: Sean Robins
- Companies: 13 Films and So It Goes Entertainment
- Writers: Cory Todd Hughes and Adrian Speckert
- Director: Steven C. Miller (Under Fire)
- The pitch: according to Deadline, they are aiming for horror-thriller energy that nods to a certain survival phenomenon and a certain animatronic nightmare
"the thrilling intensity of Squid Game with the haunting atmosphere of Five Nights at Freddy's"
So, what exactly is Finding Frankie
The game is a parkour-forward mascot horror adventure from SuperLou Games. It hit PC in October 2024, with console ports set for 2025. The setup is simple and wonderfully weird: players find a secret invitation — sometimes literally a VHS tape stuffed into a box of Frankie's Fruit Flakes cereal from the fictional Frankie's Cereal Company. That invite grants access to Frankie's Parkour Palace, marketed as the world's largest indoor parkour-trampoline-water playground. Think family fun center on steroids, all smiles on the outside.
Inside, the place flips into a private-streamed deathmatch with a $5 million prize. The cute mascots — including Frankie and Henry Hotline — stop being cartoony illusions and turn into hyper-realistic, very-much-trying-to-kill-you animatronics. You sprint, wall-jump, rail-grind, swing, and crawl through vents while dodging traps, cameras, and chrome-teethed pursuers. Get caught or mistime a move and the host and the course itself do the 'eliminating,' and not in the metaphorical sense.
What the movie might change
Expect the film to stick close to the game's core: the cereal-box invite, the Palace-as-theme-park-from-hell, the mascot menace, and the bloodsport stream. The big question is what backstory they layer in. The game keeps things lean and kinetic; a feature probably digs into who built this place, why the mascots are the way they are, and who is bankrolling the livestreamed carnage. Done right, that context could actually make the running, jumping, and screaming hit harder.
My read
On one hand, I get the appeal. This is tailor-made for a tense, propulsive genre movie, and the parkour angle could give the action a real identity instead of just 'more vents, more jump scares.' On the other hand, we are deep in the era where every buzzy game gets circled by film and TV folks like it is the last slice of pizza. Great if the adaptation adds something. Less great if it feels like a content funnel and not, you know, a movie.
Still, Finding Frankie has the right kind of twisted toybox to stand out if they embrace the velocity and the satirical edge of turning a cereal mascot into a murder machine. No release date yet. Curious where you land on this one: excited, skeptical, or both?