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.
“We actually wrote a ‘Truth or Dare’ sequel,” he said. “In the first one, there’s about nine characters and seven of them die, and 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.
“So we wrote this script — ‘Truth or Dare IRL’ — and it begins with Markie and Olivia, Lucy and Violett’s characters,” he continued. “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.”
Blumhouse founder and CEO Jason Blum was bullish on making the film during the pandemic, Wadlow said, but 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.”
Although Wadlow was excited for 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.”
