After a lot of hand-wringing, the Evil Dead remake turned out to be much ado about nothing. Most people were fine with it, some hated it with a passion, and the mainstream generally thought it was ok. For a low budget horror film, it did pretty great business, snaring $97 million worldwide. So we'd expect a new Evil Dead 2, right?
Wrong, says Jane Levy, who tells Bloody Disgusting that there are currently no plans for Evil Dead 2.
"I don’t think they’re gonna make it. I mean, they’re always coming up with a new thing- now I hear they’re making a TV show. I was like, what? [Laughs] "I honestly don’t know, but it doesn’t seem like there’s going to be an EVIL DEAD 2 anytime soon. At least, not with me in it."
Levy, the "final girl" of the remake, goes on to say she suspects Sam Raimi and company like messing with the fans regarding Evil Dead. So any wildly-ambitious Evil Dead plans to cross Levy's character over with Bruce Campbell's Ash from the original trilogy are probably complete poppycock. Though Raimi is indeed working on a new television series with Campbell, that much is true: the question is, even given Raimi and Campbell's shared television experience, if there's a market for such a thing. Army Of Darkness was a long time ago.
The legacy of Evil Dead may already be written for Raimi, who seemed to have moved on from the trilogy after the completion of The Evil Dead, Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn and Captain Supermarket*. He's since graduated not only to bigger fare but also less horror-centric: among Raimi's filmography, you'll find a western (The Quick And The Dead), a sports film (For Love Of The Game), a sobering drama (A Simple Plan) and an effects-heavy kids' film (Oz, The Great And Powerful). His dips back into horror (Drag Me To Hell, Spider-Man 3) feel more obligatory than anything else. Founding Ghost House Productions at Sony seemed less about getting great horror out to the public and more about finding the best way to make a decent profit in Hollywood. The quality of several Ghost House productions confirm that.
The other matter to consider is that Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn is such a massive step up from the original in several ways, and it would be even more overwhelming a task for Fede Alvarez or any other director. This isn't like Halloween II, where Rob Zombie was sequelizing his own film but also making a new version of 1981's not-a-classic sequel of the same name. Evil Dead 2 would have to be a quantum leap from the first one in complete mayhem, comic madness, and technical wizardry, and maybe that's just too high a bar. Evil Dead was remade. Evil Dead 2 remains untouchable. *Actual Japanese title for Army Of Darkness.
