The situation surrounding The Purge 6 is a strange one, if only for the fact the next installment in the hit horror/thriller franchise has yet to be given the official green light by Universal.
The series has earned over half a billion dollars at the box office on combined production costs of just $53 million, while creator James DeMonaco has a script written and is willing to direct for the first time since third chapter Election Year. He did say he’d only make the movie if it starred Frank Grillo as Leo Barnes, but that isn’t going to be an issue for the actor.
Jason Blum admitted at the beginning of the month that he hadn’t read the screenplay, but did say The Purge 6 was a definite possibility. In a new interview with The Illuminerdi, DeMonaco offered up some details about the story, which is set to feature a ten-year time jump.
“I would say this, this is the thing I can give away, we return ten years after The Forever Purge and America has been completely remapped and we’ve been completely tribalized in a very, what word would I apply to that? We’ve been tribalize. So our walls and our states are completely broken down into new definitions of why people have gone to certain states, so America’s completely different. Yeah. I woke up after January 6th, a couple weeks later, with the idea, so it was, again, born from the sociopolitical climate we’re living in now.”
There wasn’t many directions for the mythology left to go in the modern day following the conclusion of The Forever Purge, so pitching audiences in a decade down the line presents the ideal opportunity to reinvent the lore in an entirely new context, as well as explaining what’s brought Leo back into the fold at least fifteen years after we last saw him in Purge canon.