TRUTH OR DARE, starring Lucy Hale and Tyler Posey landed in 2018 and was a big hit for Universal & Blumhouse, so why no sequel?
Director Jeff Wadlow is doing the rounds promoting his new horror IMAGINARY and according to a new report from Variety, a wild TRUTH OR DARE sequel concept almost saw the light of day.
“We actually wrote a sequel,” Wadlow says. “In the first one, there’s about nine characters and seven of them die. I didn’t want to do a ‘Final Destination’-style sequel or ‘Truth or Dare’ and it’s happening again to a different group of people. It just seemed kind of boring to me.”
He explains to Variety that an idea was born out of the real-life friendship between the cast members of the first film. They jokingly tossed around the idea of a meta sequel wherein they play themselves, and after the concept was pitched to Wadlow, he ended up writing a script titled TRUTH OR DARE IRL.
“It begins with Markie and Olivia, Lucy and [Violett Beane’s] characters,” Wadlow says. “They’re in this scene, and it feels like our ‘Final Destination’ kind-of ‘Truth or Dare’ scene, and Markie starts laughing in the middle of it. You hear, ‘Cut!’ and the director walks on the set, and we do the ‘New Nightmare’ treatment where we reveal that Lucy and Violett are still friends. They’re going to go on this trip with the other actors from ‘Truth or Dare,’ with Tyler, Landon [Liboiron] and Sam [Lerner].
“Everyone who was in the first film, they’re all buddies, and we find out what happened is the writers of the first film had researched a real demon. Just as Calux can haunt a game in the film, he’s now decided to haunt a movie in the real world. It was scary and surreal and funny and played a lot with subjectivity.”
This project was taken to Blumhouse and Jason Blum set a start date, but TRUTH OR DARE IRL looks to be another casualty of the Covid outbreak.
“The ship has sailed,” Wadlow says of the film’s chances of ever getting made.