'Saw' Reboot Release Date Moves To The Terrifying Month Of May

The Saw movies used to be a tradition every Halloween season. A new sequel would roll around every October, to the point where they adopted the somewhat nonsensical tagline "If it's Halloween, it must be Saw!" The new Saw reboot, from the twisted mind of Chris Rock, was originally set for an October release date as well – October 23, 2020. But now the latest deathtrap-laden entry has been bumped up a few months, to May 2020. There's never a wrong time for horror as far as I'm concerned, but dropping Saw in the summertime seems...odd.

So when is the new Saw release date? May 15, 2020. That puts it right at the start of the summer movie season, which is certainly a choice. It also puts it directly up against Scoob!, the new Scooby-Doo movie. So I guess you're going to have to make a hard choice that day, my friends. The new Saw stars Chris Rock, Samuel L. Jackson, Max Minghella, and Marisol Nichols.

In the still-untilted film (which, let's be honest, will probably just be called Saw), Rock plays "a police detective investigating a series of grisly crimes and Jackson will portray Rock's father." Minghella plays William Schenk, Rock's partner, while Nichols plays Capt. Angie Garza, Rock's boss. You can expect the film to have "new amped-up level of deviously treacherous traps, clever clues and the edge-of-the-seat suspense they expect from one of the world's most terrifying horror franchises." Darren Lynn Bousman, director of Saw II, III and IV, is helming a script by Pete Goldfinger and Josh Stolberg, from an idea Rock came up with.

I'm immensely curious about this entire project. While I'm a major horror fan, I was never a big supporter of the Saw franchise. I thought the first film was a clever, tense, low-budget horror-thriller, and then almost all of the sequels were needlessly complicated torture-porn that didn't really appeal to me. But the fact that this new movie comes from an original idea by Rock, and stars both Rock and Samuel L. Jackson, has my attention. I don't know if the movie will turn out to be good, but I have a feeling it'll be interesting. But will audiences be in the mood for a Saw movie in May? I get the impression that one of the reasons the Saw franchise flourished for so long was that the October releases were perfect for audiences seeking horror-themed fair for October. We'll have to see if the same thing happens in May 2020.