Eight years have passed since Fede Alvarez directed the 2013 version of Evil Dead (watch it HERE), and while there was talk of a sequel soon after that film’s release, the franchise has moved on since then. Franchise hero Ash was missing from the ’13 film, but Bruce Campbell made his triumphant return to that role with the Starz TV series Ash vs. Evil Dead, and now that Campbell is retired from playing Ash there’s another movie being made without him, writer/director Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise. But Alvarez says there’s “definitely a chance” that he could still make an Evil Dead sequel someday.
Speaking with ComicBook.com, Alvarez said,
There is definitely a chance. The problem is, we have to stop saying there is a chance, because then there’s a headline the next day, ‘There’s a new movie coming!’ and, no! This is what I can tell: (producers) Rob Tapert and Sam Raimi, we’re like family. We get together once in a while, we had a great experience making that movie, they gave us (Alvarez and co-writer Rodo Sayagues) a career in this business. We always discuss that and there was some discussion very early on about a sequel and we haven’t gotten to write it, we never wrote a script, but we knew where it was gonna go and, at that point, for some reason, it didn’t happen. And now it went (the Evil Dead Rise) route.”
The 2013 Evil Dead had the following synopsis:
Mia (Jane Levy), a drug addict, is determined to kick the habit. To that end, she asks her brother, David (Shiloh Fernandez), his girlfriend, Natalie (Elizabeth Blackmore) and their friends Olivia (Jessica Lucas) and Eric (Lou Taylor Pucci) to accompany her to their family’s remote forest cabin to help her through withdrawal. Eric finds a mysterious Book of the Dead at the cabin and reads aloud from it, awakening an ancient demon. All hell breaks loose when the malevolent entity possesses Mia.
While Alvarez and Sayagues had an idea for a sequel in 2013, it sounds like they would take a different approach if Evil Dead came back around to them now. Alvarez continued,
I think anything can happen in the world of Evil Dead. It’s such a fascinating world, there’s so many fans out there that want to see it, so it will just have to happen that all of us suddenly align in some moment in our lives and we go, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to do this?’ and have the perfect idea. We all gravitate towards that, usually, the perfect story that we all want to go, ‘That has not been told before, let’s do it.’ That’s what we need, just to find the story at some point and find the time.”
It makes sense that they would need to find a different story, because the original sequel idea probably would have centered on Jane Levy’s character Mia, and judging by recent comments it doesn’t look like Alvarez and Levy are very likely to make more horror projects together.