The Saw franchise has never lain dormant for too long, with the longest gap being the seven years between the gimmicky 3D effort and Jigsaw, so it’s hardly a surprise to hear that there are no plans for the long-running horror series to draw to a close, especially when Spiral has recently seen it become one of just a few brands in the genre’s history to join the illustrious billion-dollar club.
Chris Rock’s reinvention of the property may have suffered from tepid reviews and currently sits on a middling Rotten Tomatoes score of 37%, but it’s already recouped the $20 million budget in theaters, and a tenth installment in the main timeline is now in early development, while Lionsgate are also discussing a potential TV show as well.
Indeed, in a new interview, Spiral director and Saw veteran Darren Lynn Bousman admitted that there’s still plenty of gas left in the tank, whether it be sequels to his latest effort or the continued expansion of the mythology built out from Tobin Bell’s iconic Jigsaw.
“I think that the producers, Mark Burg and Oren Koules, are very superstitious about success of the current one before they think ahead to the next one. That is still a ways away. We’re in a different landscape now with COVID, with theaters reopening, all of that, so I think that conversation comes when VOD and Blu-rays eventually hit. I can tell you that I don’t think there’s any plan on stopping, I can say that, but to get into specifics of what they have planned next, I don’t have any information that way. But I do think the plan is to continue this thing as long as audiences keep going to theaters.”
The core concept of Saw essentially boils down to the elaborate and grisly traps used by the antagonist to torture their victims, so it’s relatively straightforward to keep delivering new content based on the main selling point of the franchise, made somewhat easier by the fact that Spiral has succeeded without the two most recognizable faces tied to the universe in Jigsaw and Billy the Puppet.
Of course, any big name horror that comes with a built-in audience is going to stick around until it simply isn’t commercially viable anymore, and that’s a problem that Saw hasn’t run into quite yet, even with nine films and counting in the can.
