If you're looking for someone to irrationally hate right now, I suggest you look no further than Samuel Bayer. He's the director behind the #1 movie in America of the moment, the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street, which our Eric Eisenberg called worthless. He's also probably going to be the director of the sequel, which The Wrap reports Warner Bros. has already greenlit. Oh, and those of you who think Bayer ruined an iconic franchise? You just need to get out of the house and get a girlfriend.
That last bit of adding insult to injury comes from a short interview Bayer did with Fangoria, but lets get to the sequel news first. On the heels of Nightmare's $32.2 million opening, Warner Bros. Dan Fellman admitted "We don't have a story yet" for a sequel, "but this is the largest horror opening in the April-May corridor, and it just proves there's a lot left in the franchise." You may remember hearing some pretty similar language back in February 2009, when the Platinum Dunes remake of Friday the 13th had an opening weekend even better than Nightmare's, $45 million, and got even better reviews; the studio immediately greenlit a sequel, but just last week we learned the sequel had been called off-- because as we all know, once Jason Voorhees dies he's dead and never coming back. We have no reason to believe the same treatment won't befall Nightmare, and once the high of opening weekend is replaced by a complete beatdown from Iron Man 2, Warner Bros. will cancel this sequel too.
OK, so Bayer may not have the guaranteed sequel opportunity that seems to be there right now, but don't go feeling sorry for him. In that Fangoria interview, Bayer had some choice words for both fans and critics who dared question his take on Wes Craven's original film:
“Look, I’m gonna catch a lot of heat for this. But some of these fans on the web should just get up, stretch, breathe, go outside and get some fresh air, maybe get a girlfriend and just get a life. They should see the movie and make up their own minds.”
Bayer seems to know that the quickest way to rile up the Internet is to suggest we're basement-bound losers with no social life (not to mention assuming we're all either straight men or lesbians), and yeah, the gambit worked. But does he really want to alienate a giant portion of the horror fanbase, who didn't like the sequel for good reasons, when a sequel is on its way? If we weren't so convinced that this sequel is never going to happen anyway, we'd be worried about its future.
