Yahoo News Why Blumhouse Scrapped a ‘Truth or Dare’ Meta Sequel With Tyler Posey and Lucy Hale at the Last Minute (EXCLUSIVE)
The 2018 Blumhouse chiller “Truth or Dare” was a profitable hit for the company, making over $95 million worldwide on a $3.5 million budget. The film — about a demon named Calux that is activated by the titular party game — starred a buzzy cast full of young talent, including “Teen Wolf” lead Tyler Posey, “Pretty Little Liars” star Lucy Hale, Violett Beane, Landon Liboiron and Sam Lerner, who all bonded offscreen during filming. That camaraderie led to a sequel idea that could have been one of Blumhouse’s most innovative movies.
While talking about his upcoming film “Imaginary,” Jeff Wadlow, who directed “Truth or Dare” and co-wrote it with Michael Reisz, Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach, revealed the ambitious plans for a sequel that almost started production during quarantine.
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“We actually wrote a ‘Truth or Dare’ sequel,” he said. “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.”
Yet Wadlow was inspired by the real-life friendships that developed between the cast while making the first film, and spun it into an idea inspired by the meta 1994 Freddy Krueger sequel “Wes Craven’s New Nightmare.”
“They had become great friends and were going on trips together, hanging out in Big Bear,” he said. “They had this idea: ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if ‘Truth or Dare’ happened to us while we were on vacation together, the actors?’ The joke became that the sequel should be called ‘Truth or Big Bear.’ I thought that was kind of a brilliant idea.”
Posey described the impromptu creative process that came as a result of the cast’s Big Bear trip.
“We all died in the movie, so there was no way we could do a ‘Part 2,'” he said. “But I’ve been writing since I was a kid and directing and filming stuff with my friends, so I always kind of try to find the best creative route that we could turn into something. So I started thinking, ‘Well, what’s a cool way we could all be in “Part 2″ and still make it work?’ And we were on our way in the truck and I remember coming up with the idea of, ‘What if it’s about us? We’re at the premiere of the original movie and we’re playing ourselves.’ And then we all go on a trip to Big Bear, and while we’re there, some crazy shit happens. So they were like ‘Fuck yeah, that’s so fun.’ But I don’t know if anybody took it seriously, but the whole trip and Big Bear, I was like, ‘Oh God, I gotta define this idea, this concept — refine it and then pitch it to Jeff.”
Wadlow was intrigued by the pitch.
“So we wrote this script — ‘Truth or Dare IRL’ — and it begins with Markie and Olivia, Lucy and Violett’s characters,” Wadlow said. “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 and Sam. 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.”
Posey, who initially developed the idea on a Big Bear trip before talking it out with Wadlow, said that the secret to the idea was the real-life chemistry the cast developed while shooting the first film, a rarity on most projects.
“What helped it was that we were all basically the same age,” he said. “Most of the time you’re on a movie and you know, sometimes you’re the youngest person there, or sometimes you’re the oldest person there. But the magic happened and we all got along.”
Blumhouse founder and CEO Jason Blum was bullish on making the film during the pandemic, Wadlow said. Unfortunately, COVID also ended up being the film’s downfall.
“I got a call from Jason,” Wadlow said. “‘Would you be willing to move into the hotel on the Universal lot with all the actors from ‘Truth or Dare’ and the crew, and quarantine with everyone and make a movie during the height of the pandemic?’ I was in, and we started prepping it. There’s this one cabin on the Universal lot where they’ve shot a million things — we were going to take over that cabin. But I think they started to realize that the health and safety risks involved at that moment, and also the cost implications of basically not letting people leave, would mean everyone was on overtime for the entire shoot, and they pulled the plug on it.”
While the project fell through, it did encourage Posey to stand up for his creative contributions behind the scenes, earning him a credit for coming up with the idea and fostering it on that fateful trip.
“It was sort of foggy because I came up with the idea, I pitched it to Jeff, and then somebody else wrote it,” he said. “So they didn’t know which credit to give me. And at first, they were just like, ‘What if we film it and then do a behind-the-scenes and the interviews, we just have you tell them that you created the idea?’ I was like, ‘Hell no, I want a credit on this. I want it to be professional and I want my name rolling on the credits. I feel like I deserve it. Blumhouse eventually agreed to that, and the deal was that I got creative credit. That was such an accomplishment for me.”
Although Wadlow was excited about the project, he thinks it’s unlikely it will ever get made, saying, “The ship has sailed.”
“Too much time has passed,” he said. “But I think that would have been a lot of fun to make and the audience would have dug it.”
Posey agreed.
“It was definitely heartbreaking that we didn’t get a chance to do it, but I just love that story so much,” he said.
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