Black Phone 3 is not planned at the moment

Director Scott Derrickson explains why he doesn’t have a sequel in sight.

While The Black Phone 2 successfully launched in American cinemas last weekend, its director Scott Derrickson — already behind Sinister And Doctor Strange — discusses the possibility of continuing the horrific saga with a Black Phone 3…But nothing has really been done yet.

The filmmaker, who has already achieved the feat of giving a new dimension to the masked killer nicknamed the Grabber (played by Ethan Hawke), remains lucid on the logic of the sequels: “There is no justification for making a sequel unless it is to try to make a better film than the last one,” he explains in Variety before insisting:

“And if we make a third, it must be better than the second, which itself must be better than the first. Few sagas achieve this. In my eyes, only the Evil Dead trilogy by Sam Raimi and that of Night of the Living Dead by George Romero really manage to reach a crescendo.”

Compared to Halloween 3 for his way of reinventing his own universe, The Black Phone 2 explores a new facet of Grabber — this sadistic and charismatic child killer, who kidnaps his victims to lock them in a cellar. But Derrickson remains cautious about the future:

“What’s important to me is not to repeat the same things. We shouldn’t say to ourselves: ‘Hey, we found a new rule for the Grabber, let’s just do that again.’ That would be the one thing I would refuse to do.”

In other words: if Black Phone 3 sees the light of day, it will be to surprise – not to rehash the corpses of the past.