The Forever Purge had been marketed as the franchise’s *final* movie, but creator James DeMonaco eventually walked back those statements with the suggestion that he may actually have one more Purge story in the tank. The plan, last we heard? To bring Frank Grillo back as Leo Barnes, his character from The Purge: Anarchy and The Purge: Election Year.

“I think I’m going to write the next one, and if the audience wants it, we’ll do it,” DeMonaco told Daily Dead back in 2021. “Again, I think I came up with a new way to flip the whole thing upside down, and it’ll be five years after [The Forever Purge], but it takes America in a whole new direction and I think it would be a very interesting place to explore.”

DeMonaco explains to Variety in a new update this week that he finished the script “about eight months ago.” He tells the site, “It’s not completely different than previous movies, but it’s a new America that we’re entering into. In The Forever Purge, America kind of collapsed, and it’s really kind of mapped itself according to different ideologies. The states are based on sexuality, religion and ideology. So we’ve broken apart and the state of discord is at its worst.”

“We enter The Purge in that world,” DeMonaco adds, echoing his comments from 2021.

A former Los Angeles Police Department sergeant, Leo Barnes set out on Purge Night in The Purge: Anarchy to seek revenge for the drunk driving death of his son, though he ultimately spared the life of the man responsible. In The Purge: Election Year, Barnes is the head of security for senator Charlie Roan, eventually becoming the new Director of the Secret Service.

The sixth Purge movie would presumably find Leo Barnes once again fighting for his life in a very different America, with The Forever Purge turning it into an apocalyptic landscape.