The Saw franchise had well and truly run out of gas long before eighth installment Jigsaw hit theaters in 2017, with the critical and commercial reception of the series also on a downwards trajectory. The highest-rated movie on Rotten Tomatoes is the 2004 original, and even then it only holds a score of 49%, but audiences never flocked to the latest Saw outing to see well-developed characters and intriguing narratives.
It was all about the inventive traps and buckets of gore that came with them, and on that front, the franchise always delivered. After bringing in more than $975 million at the box office on combined production costs of just $77 million, there was no chance that we’d seen the last of Saw. And sure enough, a soft reboot was announced in 2019 and instantly became the most anticipated sequel yet.
The reason people are so curious about Spiral is almost entirely down to the presence of Chris Rock as star, executive producer and originator of the story. The 55 year-old doesn’t appear in a lot of movies, and when he does, they usually involve Adam Sandler. Of course, the intrigue surrounding the ninth chapter only increased when it was announced that Samuel L. Jackson had also joined the cast.
Spiral was set to be released in May, but was pushed back an entire year as the result of the Coronavirus pandemic. And while it remains to be seen how it’ll turn out, it seems the studio is pretty confident in it as we’ve heard from our sources – the same ones that told us Netflix were working on a sequel to Extraction and a spinoff for The Witcher before either was confirmed – that the current plan is for Rock to headline an entire Saw trilogy.
According to our intel, the actor will star in and develop Spiral sequels, and the studio is planning on having the next three movies tie together into one overarching story thread in an effort to distance them from the previous poorly-received entries in the franchise. Of course, plans could always change should the film not perform well. But right now, at least, they’re hoping to have this latest entry start a new trilogy.