Though this may feel like a dispatch from a different dimension, the first part of Renny Harlin’s trilogy of rebooted Strangers films came out this year. Following the original like a road map, Harlin’s big idea is setting up the town around the Strangers, allowing the events of Chapter 1 to play out exactly how they did in 2008. With Chapter 2 coming to theaters next year, Lionsgate, a studio not suffering from an acute case of no one seeing or liking its movies, wonders if maybe a child Stranger would spice things up.
The trailer for Chapter 2 teases the same thing as Chapter 1: A whole town of goddamned Strangers. Seemingly picking up right where the last left off, Maya (Madeline Petsch) wakes up in the hospital, ready to escape this rural hellhole, only to fall out of the frying pan into the fire. Maya flees into the rainy wilderness when a gang of probable Strangers picks her up. The end of the trailer posits the movie’s big surprise, a child Stranger asking if “Tamara’s home.”
Filmed as concurrently as a trilogy, the new series aims to expand the universe of bag-wearing unwelcome houseguests. Critics and audiences dismissed and ignored the reboot, for the most part, but it has proven a rare and much-needed success for Lionsgate. Unlike Borderlands, The Strangers: Chapter 1 only cost $8 million and returned $47 million, which is the type of Hollywood accounting Lionsgate should study closely. There’s no release date for The Strangers: Chapter 2, but the film is expected in 2025.