{"id":83351,"date":"2025-10-18T19:10:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-18T19:10:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/83351\/"},"modified":"2025-10-18T19:10:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-18T19:10:08","slug":"will-there-be-a-black-phone-3-the-sequels-writer-and-director-weigh-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/83351\/","title":{"rendered":"Will there be a Black Phone 3? The sequel’s writer and director weigh in"},"content":{"rendered":"

Black Phone 2<\/a> goes to places longtime horror fans may recognize. While the 2025 sequel follows the same protagonists and villain from 2021\u2019s The Black Phone<\/a> \u2014 a serial killer and the kids who use supernatural powers to stop his run of kidnapping, torturing, and murdering children \u2014 it expands on the first film\u2019s world, and brings in a few familiar elements from other horror movies. It\u2019d take a deep-cut horror specialist to recognize the ice-skating elements from 1983\u2019s Curtains<\/a>, but the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise inspirations are clearer \u2014 especially the ties to A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors.<\/p>\n

\"Gwen
\n Image: Universal Pictures<\/p>\n

Wes Craven and New Line Cinema turned Nightmare on Elm Street into a nine-film franchise, complete with novels, comics, a video game, and a TV spin-off. Could The Black Phone have the same staying power? Could this become a long-running horror series like the Freddy Krueger movies, but with longer-lived protagonists instead of a new batch of Freddy-chum in every installment? Before any of that, the first question would be, \u201cWill there be a Black Phone 3?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI can\u2019t think about filmmaking that way,\u201d director Scott Derrickson told Polygon at Fantastic Fest 2025, after Black Phone 2\u2019s world premiere. \u201cI understand that’s the business of the studios, trying to create film franchises. And I certainly respect film franchises as a horror fan. But as a filmmaker, I have to go one film at a time, and any film that I work on, I have to feel like this might be the last one I get to do. So it had to be complete. We haven’t had one conversation about a Black Phone 3, and I don’t know that we will.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWould we love to work with [Black Phone stars Mason Thames, Madeleine McGraw, and Ethan Hawke] again? Absolutely,\u201d said C. Robert Cargill, Derrickson\u2019s writing partner on both Black Phone movies, along with Sinister, Sinister 2, and other projects. \u201cWould we love to get the band back together? Absolutely. Would I love to explore those characters some more? I thought about it. But it all comes down to: Is there a good enough idea to justify us putting a year of our life into making that? When you commit to a movie, that becomes part of your life for at least a year. So it’s really got to be something really great and inspiring for us to want to make a third one.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Executive
\n Photo:\u00a0Sabrina Lantos\/Universal Pictures<\/p>\n

The initial pitch for Black Phone 2 came from Locke & Key and NOS4A2 author Joe Hill, whose 2004 short story inspired the first movie.<\/p>\n

\u201cJoe Hill called me and said, \u2018I have the dumbest idea,\u2019 And I’m like, \u2018I love dumb ideas!\u2019\u201d Cargill said. \u201cThe core idea was, \u2018A phone rings, Finny answers, and it’s The Grabber calling from Hell.\u2019 And Joe had a couple other great ideas, like, \u2018The mask is now just his face, that\u2019s who he is, what’s left of him.\u2019 Some of those ideas ended up in the film, some didn’t, but the call was the core idea that was like, \u2018Oh yeah, we can make a movie out of this. That’s an idea where we have the mythology [already] set up from the first film. There’s lots of stuff to explore there.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Both men emphasized that they\u2019re open to a Black Phone 3 if they run across a similarly hooky core idea, from Hill or elsewhere, but they don\u2019t want to make a sequel just for the sake of a franchise.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf it happens, it happens,\u201d Derrickson said. \u201cBut it was the same thing after the first movie \u2014 the day after opening weekend, Jeff Shell, the chairman of NBCUniversal, emailed me and said, \u2018You’re going to make a sequel, right?\u2019 And I was like, \u2018I have no idea.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Derrickson pointed out that horror is full of film franchises, but in his opinion, there are \u201conly two great horror trilogies\u201d: Sam Raimi\u2019s Evil Dead trilogy and George A. Romero\u2019s original Night of the Living Dead and its two direct sequels, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don’t think there’s another trilogy that by itself is truly great, where all three films are excellent, and it can be argued that, in both cases, the sequel is better than the original, and the third film is better than the sequel,\u201d Derrickson said. \u201cI don’t know how I could possibly continue to work on any film franchise unless I was at least trying to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Black Phone 2 is in theaters now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Black Phone 2 goes to places longtime horror fans may recognize. While the 2025 sequel follows the same…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":83352,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[146,85,46,397],"class_list":["post-83351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=83351"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83351\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/83352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}