After earning $155 million at the box office on a $9 million budget, it was inevitable that Adam Robitel’s psychological horror Escape Room would end up getting a sequel, but last year’s Tournament of Champions didn’t fare anywhere near as well as its predecessor.
Of course, the pandemic was a huge factor in why takings dropped by over $100 million when the second installment landed in theaters last summer, but it also didn’t help that it resolutely failed to bring a single shred of fresh innovation to the proceedings, to the extent that you’re left feeling as though the filmmakers didn’t even try.
The subtitle effectively sums up the only interesting approach to the standard tropes and trappings, in that each of the competitors are revealed to have survived a previous game, so it’s something akin to a grisly all-star special. Imagine a celebrity edition of Wipeout, but with death at the expense of hilarity, and you’ve got a pretty good picture of how things go.
A bang average 50% score on Rotten Tomatoes isn’t a disaster by the standards of franchise horror, and Escape Room: Tournament of Champions has certainly been proving itself on streaming. As per FlixPatrol, it ranks as the number one most-watched title on HBO Max in 20 countries spread out over Latin and South America, so it’s going down a storm.
