Universal Pictures dialed up new details on The Black Phone 2 from the CinemaCon stage in Las Vegas.
While filmmaker Scott Derrickson couldn’t make it to Sin City as he’s still in production, Blumhouse CEO Jason Blum had the honors (he even wore a Grabber mask for the occasion) and was joined by one of the franchise’s stars Madeleine McGraw. Together, they talked about the horror sequel before revealing a brand new trailer for the Colosseum crowd.
The first film became a surprise hit after its 2022 release when it grossed $161 million against an $18 million budget. It followed the events of what happens when a young boy is abducted and locked in a basement. While there, he starts receiving calls on a disconnected phone from the previous victims of a serial killer called the Grabber, played by Ethan Hawke. Derrickson wrote the script with longtime writing partner C. Robert Cargill from a short story by Joe Hill.
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Hawke reprises his role, as do Mason Thames and McGraw with Arianna Rivas, Jeremy Davies, Demián Bichir and Miguel Mora rounding out the cast.
Blum asked McGraw what it was like to go back for the sequel. “It was truly just the best,” she said, adding that Derrickson has said he never opted to do sequels as it’s such a challenge to capture the magic. That was until he realized that they could go to “new and unexpected” places with the characters of The Black Phone. That’s true, considering that Hawke’s serial killer died in the first film.
Before the trailer debuted, McGraw exited the stage by saying she’s not old enough to watch the R-rated film. (In a fun moment, she also appeared to welcome her sister, Violet McGraw, to the stage to introduce her own Blumhouse film, M3GAN 2.0.)
The trailer that showed featured requisite creepy sequences of a black phone ringing inside a lone telephone booth located on a snowy tundra. Thames’s character answers and has a heated exchange with the Grabber, who says, “Did you think our story was over?” to which the boy replies, “You’re dead.” The Grabber has the answer: “You of all people should know that dead is just a word.”
In a February interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Derrickson said that he hadn’t planned on a sequel until Hill floated an idea that proved to be too good to pass up. But then he opted to make the Apple TV+ original film The Gorge starring Miles Teller and Anya Taylor Joy. “I realized that if I made a big movie like The Gorge first, the [Black Phone] kids [Mason Thames and Madeleine McGraw] would be in high school by the time I finished,” Derrickson told THR. “So I’d have a window of time with them in high school, and I could make a high school coming-of-age movie in the same way that the original was a middle school coming-of-age movie.”
He continued by teasing that The Black Phone 2 would not be a retread of its predecessor. “This one has a much more complicated world and idea, and it was thrilling to not repeat the first movie. The worst kind of horror sequel is the one where you try to do the same thing again, but just more of it,” he said. “That goes for any sequel in any genre, frankly. I knew I didn’t want to do that, and the best sequels are the ones that surprise you.”
Audiences will find out when Universal releases the film on Oct. 17.
CinemaCon, the annual gathering of cinema owners and Hollywood studios, is hosted in Las Vegas by the newly rebranded Cinema United, which for decades was known as the National Association of Theatre Owners. This year’s edition runs from March 31 to April 3.
