After scaring up $18 million in theaters earlier this year, horror-comedy The Blackening is getting a sequel from Lionsgate, Variety has exclusively announced this afternoon.
Variety notes, “producer MRC and domestic distributor Lionsgate have entered into talks with Dewayne Perkins, Tracy Oliver and producer E. Brian Dobbins to develop a follow-up film.”
The first film was made on a production budget of just $5 million, so there’s needless to say lots of potential for this to become a profitable Scary Movie-type horror franchise.
Stay tuned for more on The Blackening 2 as we learn it.
The Blackening, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, centers around a group of Black friends who reunite for a Juneteenth weekend getaway only to find themselves trapped in a remote cabin with a twisted killer. Forced to play by his rules, the friends soon realize this ain’t no motherf****** game.
Directed by Tim Story (Ride Along, Think Like A Man, Barbershop) and co-written by Tracy Oliver (Girls Trip, Harlem) and Dewayne Perkins (“The Amber Ruffin Show,” “Brooklyn Nine-Nine”), The Blackening skewers genre tropes and poses the sardonic question: if the entire cast of a horror movie is Black, who dies first?
Joe Lipsett wrote in his 4-star TIFF review, “While the film isn’t Scream levels of meta, The Blackening fuses social commentary about the Black experience in contemporary America with slasher conventions in a highly entertaining fashion.”
“The humour is successful, the violence is fun and frequently cheeky, and the characters are loveable,” Joe’s review for BD continues. “In a slasher film, that’s saying a lot!”
The Blackening stars Antoinette Robertson, Dewayne Perkins, Sinqua Walls, Grace Byers, X Mayo, Melvin Gregg, Jermaine Fowler, Yvonne Orji, and Jay Pharoah.
