It isn’t just horror’s biggest brands that are franchised into oblivion countless times over, before being dredged back up and run into the ground all over again, with few B-tier properties exemplifying that approach better than Wrong Turn.
The 2003 original wasn’t even all that successful, earning less than $30 million at the box office on a $12 million budget, but a dying horse was flogged nonetheless. Direct sequels Dead End and Left for Dead were knocked out rapidly with minimal resources, even if the second installment is actually pretty good all things considered.
However, things got confusing when Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings landed in 2011, which acted as a prequel to the original, before being followed by Bloodlines just one year later, making it a sequel to the prequel that was still a prequel to the first Wrong Turn. Two years after that, Last Resort rebooted the entire thing from the ground up, which marked the last entry until 2021’s Wrong Turn, another full-blown reboot that started from scratch once again.
That one was better than it had any right to be, too, which might be why director Mike P. Nelson seemed confident in the chances of the reboot of a reboot of the sequel to the prequel of the prequel to a movie that got two sequels would get a sequel of its own (got all that?) while speaking to ComicBook.
“We are doing what we can, and I’ll leave it at that. We would love to be able to continue this and again, with each movie going forward, keep that subversion happening because I feel like that’s what this next round is. I would love to keep going on that journey with Alan and Constantin. So we’ll see. Fingers crossed. Let’s just put it this way, we have ideas and they’re a lot of fun.”
It’ll probably happen, but at this stage there’s no real need for an eighth Wrong Turn, and if Nelson isn’t at the helm then it’ll more than likely end up getting rebooted for a third time anyway.