Given the low production costs involved, it typically doesn’t take too long to cobble together a Paranormal Activity movie, at least when compared to your typical horror sequels. The low cost and high reward approach has seen the franchise become one of the most profitable properties in the history of cinema, having brought in $890 million at the box office on combined production budgets of $28 million.
However, the seventh installment won’t be aiming to bring the series to the mythical billion-dollar threshold that Saw recently passed, with Underwater director William Eubank’s new chapter heading straight to Paramount+. We’ve known for a while that Paranormal Activity 7 was set to land on streaming before the end of the year, but based on comments by producer Jason Blum, we should probably expect it around Halloween time after he revealed the film is ready to go.
Every Paranormal Activity with the exception of The Marked Ones released between October 14th and October 23rd, so by that logic we’ve got a pretty good idea of when the seventh could arrive. Blum also admitted that he wasn’t too sold on the idea of continuing the saga, which is why the decision was made to reboot the franchise as it migrates to Paramount+.
“The movie’s done. Yeah, we did it. Paramount wanted to continue Paranormal Activity, I probably would have left it alone. So they wanted to continue it, but I thought if they were gonna continue it, you gotta… It was tired, there was no way to continue the road that we’d been down. So I really encouraged all the creative people involved to think of something new. A lot of people who are going to go see the new Paranormal Activity were 3 years old when the first Paranormal Activity came out, so they don’t even know from those older movies. I thought if you were going to re-do it, you better really re-do it, not try and expand what we did all those years ago.”
Plot details are non-existent, but the script hails from veteran Christopher Landon, writer of every new chapter since the original. Emily Bader, Roland Buck III, Dan Lippert, and Henry Ayres-Brown have been confirmed for the cast, but you’d imagine Paranormal Activity 7 will be keeping its cards close to the chest to try and generate hype for a concept that suffered greatly from the law of diminishing returns thanks to the annual onslaught of found footage frights.