Evil Dead Rise Director Say Film Has Reached A Crucial Point
The director Evil Dead Rise has announced a pretty big step forward for the next movie in Sam Raimi's cult horror series.
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Evil Dead Rise is one step closer to reality. Lee Cronin, the director of the upcoming fifth installment in Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead series, announced via Twitter that a whopping six months of editing on the film were done. Of course, that just means moving on to the other technical aspects of film production like sound design and ADR for screams (we presume), but it is a big leap forward for the movie. The Evil Dead franchise has time and time again shown that it has the longevity and fan base to keep going despite the decades, and we are really resisting putting in a zombie rising from the grave joke right here. But while a specific date for the release of Evil Dead Rise has not been released, it sounds like we are getting there. Here is Cronin’s Tweet:
The Lee Cronin-directed film is apparently set in the same world as the preceding Evil Dead films, so it is not a complete hard reboot. Evil Dead Rise is only the second movie to not be directed by franchise creator Sam Raimi, following 2013’s Evil Dead (which was helmed by Uruagyuan director Fede Álvarez). That film grossed nearly a $100 million dollars from a comparatively small $17 million budget, which apparently has justified the continuation of the series. That movie was essentially a remake/soft reboot/requel (things have really gotten complicated these days) of Raimi’s original 1981 film The Evil Dead, and it featured an entirely new cast. Series mainstay/lead actor/famous chin Bruce Campbell showed up in a brief post-credits sequence as longtime Deadite-killer Ash Williams, but it is not known whether we will be seeing Ash in Evil Dead Rise in any capacity.
Evil Dead Rise will follow a different entirely new cast, and is the first female-led installment in the series. Australian actors Alyssa Sutherland and Lily Sullivan will play a pair of sisters in Los Angeles who discover a book of hideous dark magic, and presumably accidentally raise some bad things from the grave. Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell are both on board as executive producers, but it looks like the franchise is moving forward to creating a larger world than the original simple story of some couples being brutally murdered by ghouls in a forest. Aside from the central film series, the Evil Dead franchise also had a spin-off show starring Bruce Campbell as Ash on the Starz network, titled Ash vs Evil Dead. It ran for three critically acclaimed seasons, and Campbell announced his retirement from the role (but we’ll see).
After creating The Evil Dead (and following it up with The Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness), Sam Raimi went on to direct the Tobey Maguire-led Spider-Man trilogy of films, as well as oddball genre features like the Western The Quick & The Dead and his return to horror with Drag Me to Hell. He is currently set to direct the upcoming Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and likely will be sticking around in the MCU for some time. Evil Dead Rise is expected to be in theaters and HBO Max sometime in 2022.
