Movies
Early Response To ‘Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones’ Indicates It Might Reinvigorate The Franchise
Yesterday (Friday The 13th!) Bloody-Disgusting co-hosted a Los Angeles screening of Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones. LA was just one of the 13 US cities (it was a global event with screenings in Mexico City, Sydney and many others) that were selected to screen the film a bit early and the reaction was INSANE.
Everyone I heard from seemed to really like The Marked Ones and it seems like other screenings had an equally enthusiastic reaction (our Chicago staff seemed to dig it was well). While I can’t review the film just yet, I can say that I had a blast with it. It’s easily neck-and-neck with PA3 for me and the general consensus out there seems to be that it’s a vast improvement over PA4.
Written and directed by Christopher Landon, and starring Richard Cabral, Carlos Pratts, and Eddie J. Fernandez, the Latino-themed haunter begins “After being “marked,” Jesse begins to be pursued by mysterious forces while his family and friends try to save him.”
Glad to have Paranormal Activity back to firing on all cylinders.
Universal has been having a hell of a time getting their Universal Monsters brand back on a better path in the wake of the Dark Universe collapsing, with four movies thus far released in the years since The Mummy attempted to get that interconnected universe off the ground.
First was Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, to date the only post-Mummy hit for the Universal Monsters, followed by The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Renfield, and now Abigail. The latter three films have attempted to bring Dracula back to the screen in fresh ways, but both Demeter and Renfield severely underperformed at the box office. And while Abigail is a far better vampire movie than those two, it’s unfortunately also struggling to turn a profit.
Where does the Universal Monsters brand go from here? The good news is that Universal and Blumhouse have once again enlisted the help of Leigh Whannell for their upcoming Wolf Man reboot, which is howling its way into theaters in January 2025. This is good news, of course, because Whannell’s Invisible Man was the best – and certainly most profitable – of the post-Dark Universe movies that Universal has been able to conjure up. The film ended its worldwide run with $144 million back in 2020, a massive win considering the $7 million budget.
Given the film was such a success, you may wondering why The Invisible Man 2 hasn’t come along in these past four years. But the wait for that sequel may be coming to an end.
Speaking with the Happy Sad Confused podcast this week, The Invisible Man star Elisabeth Moss notes that she feels “very good” about the sequel’s development at this point in time.
“Blumhouse and my production company [Love & Squalor Pictures]… we are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” Moss updates this week. “And I feel very good about it.”
She adds, “We are very much intent on continuing that story.”
At the end of the 2020 movie, Elisabeth Moss’s heroine Cecilia Kass uses her stalker’s high-tech invisibility suit to kill him, now in possession of the technology that ruined her life.
Stay tuned for more on The Invisible Man 2 as we learn it.
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