Blumhouse Wrote A Truth Or Dare Sequel That We Never Got To See
In the year of our Lord Cthulhu 2024, it's abundantly clear what the general aims of the Blumhouse production company are: to make a variety of mid- to low-budget genre features that contain any sort of hook which will make a return on their investment. The 21st century's version of old exploitation companies like Empire International Pictures and New World Pictures, Blumhouse occasionally produces a breakout prestige genre film, but more often than not they're making, y'know, "Night Swim."
Not that that's a bad thing, mind you. Jason Blum and company know that horror fans love a balanced diet, happily taking their veggies along with their french fries. One of the most "french fry" movies Blumhouse ever made was 2018's "Truth or Dare," a film in which the most famous high school party game turns deadly once a supernatural element (a demon named Calux, naturally) forces the players to either participate or forfeit their lives.
A mash-up of tropes from "Final Destination," "The Ring," and "It Follows," "Truth or Dare" did smart, Blumhouse-style business at the box office upon release, making $95.3 million over a $3.5 million budget. If you look at those numbers and think to yourself "Gee, shouldn't they have made a sequel by now?," then you won't be too shocked to learn that not only was a sequel proposed, but it actually came close to happening. Sadly, a few factors (not the least of which being COVID-related shutdowns) conspired to thwart those plans, which would've seen "Truth or Dare" enter the exciting world of horror franchise meta-sequel territory.
Truth or Dare, for real this time
Apologies for spoiling a six year old movie, but "Truth or Dare" ends with most of the principal characters having met their fates, save two (played by Lucy Hale and Violett Beane). The duo are able to delay their doom by passing on the curse of the evil Truth or Dare game via an online video watched by others, thus bringing them into the game, too. According to Variety, when director and co-writer Jeff Wadlow was approached about a sequel, the filmmaker didn't want to simply make a follow-up involving a group of new characters getting caught up in the deadly game, saying that the idea "seemed kind of boring."
As it happens, the principal cast of the first film had become fairly close friends in real life, and started taking vacations together. It was during one of these trips that Tyler Posey (Lucas in the first film, and the star of MTV's "Teen Wolf" series) came up with the notion that the sequel could be something meta, where the cursed game happens to the actors who would now be playing themselves. After Posey pitched the idea to Wadlow, the director became very excited at taking the series in a direction reminiscent of "Wes Craven's New Nightmare" and "Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2." As he elaborated:
"So we wrote this script — 'Truth or Dare IRL' — and it begins with Markie and Olivia, Lucy and Violett's characters. 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 [...] 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."
Real life gets in the way of meta-life
Right away, the idea gained momentum thanks to the finished script, and it seemed that Blum and his production company were actually going to make it happen. Sadly, it was around the time things were due to start on the sequel that the COVID pandemic began, stalling the project at just the wrong time. Even so, as Wadlow recalls, Blum was willing to try and make the sequel happen:
"I got a call from Jason. '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 possibility exists that the actors and Wadlow could always reunite on another film in the future (especially seeing as how Wadlow is still working at Blumhouse with the upcoming release of his new horror film, "Imaginary"), it seems like it's a final "game over" for the "Truth or Dare" sequel. Sure, the public aren't exactly clamoring for a sequel anyhow, but given the passion behind it as well as the daring meta-sequel concept (which, including the aforementioned two examples and the "Scream" series, is still underused within horror sequels), it seems we may have been robbed of something pretty cool.