Election Year has come and gone and Anarchy has reigned, but there’s still a future for The Purge franchise.
As series mastermind James DeMonaco revealed to Vulture, a fourth film has entered development under the title of The Purge: The Island, while that fabled TV show is finally beginning to coalesce.
First up, though the mainline series. After reaffirming plans to angle The Island as a prequel movie, DeMonaco revealed that next year’s societal thriller will journey back to ground zero – Staten Island, to be specific, where the New Founding Fathers of America hatch their sadistic plan to jump-start a dying economy. Imagine a beta test, only this one allows all crime to be legal for a 24-hour period.
I said it’s the first experimental Purge, which I don’t know if I was supposed to say, but now I’ve said it, so you have it. Next July 4, it’ll be coming.
And if you’ve questioned the logic of The Purge series – particularly when it comes to those inhabitants who hang around all year and wait for the madness to unfold – you’re not alone; James DeMonaco went on to discuss how the Purge becomes ingrained in social consciousness.
People from Staten Island can easily go to Brooklyn for the evening, so what they do is start promising very decent sums of money for the very poor people in the neighborhood. It becomes a monetization of murder and violence, incentivizing killing and keeping people around for them to be victims. So you see the inception of how grotesque the idea of the Purge is, and the manipulation upon the society.
Finally, the director turned in a status report for the planned Purge TV series. It’ll be built on the foundations of a non-linear narrative, it seems, thereby allowing its creators to flit back and forth on The Purge timeline.
In the TV show I think we’re slowing it down, and we’re using this flashback structure to enter into the non-Purge lives of these people. We’re going back six months or two years or into their childhood to see some things that might’ve fed into their decision-making on this particular Purge … Ten hours is allowing us to get deeper into character and deeper into why people would actually consider violence as an option ever.
Directed by Gerard McMurray, The Purge: The Island has been penciled in for July 4th, 2018. Its spinoff TV series, on the other hand, will take place between the experimental Purge and the events Election Year. No word on a premiere window just yet, but we’ll be keeping you posted nonetheless.
