The Saw franchise is currently in the midst of a massive shift – and while we’ve seen major changes in this particular horror franchise before, the current one may be the biggest. After over 20 years of the movies being produced by Twisted Pictures, Blumhouse Productions purchased the company’s stake in the movies last year, and now the brand is back in the hands of James Wan a.k.a. the director who launched the franchise. Because of this big move, there have been a lot of question marks about what the future will look like, but now we know one thing for sure: Jigsaw is coming back.
This extremely welcomed news comes straight from James Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell, who vaguely spoke about plans for Saw while recently speaking with Bloody Disgusting at the Sundance Film Festival. The former offered an assurance to fans that we shouldn’t expect another movie like Spiral: From The Book Of Saw (the notorious failed 2021 retooling of the franchise), and added that the movie will fully embrace the legendary villain at the core of the canon. Said the OG Saw director,
This is what I’ll say. Leigh and I, we’re not going to give too much away, but we don’t think you can make a Saw movie without Jigsaw. That’s the bottom line. And ultimately, we want to hark back to the spirit, what Leigh and I love about the original first movie. The original first movie, which is Jigsaw’s philosophy and what makes him tick.
It doesn’t seem that the name “Tobin Bell” specifically came up in the conversation, but I’m going to choose not to read into that and instead be stoked that the franchise is already making some very smart choices.
The importance of Jigsaw’s presence in these movies was very strongly proven with the release of Saw X in 2023 – which will be remembered as the last movie in the Twisted Pictures era. That title earned some of the best reviews of the entire series in part because it made the choice to tell a prequel story with the notorious John Kramer as its protagonist.
In the making of the next chapter, James Wan says that the aim will be to make a movie that is more akin to the original Saw than the sequels – which is to say really bore down on the horror that is the mind of the cancer-afflicted engineer – but he is also promising that we won’t just see a rehash of material we’ve already seen. He added,
Ultimately, he’s a scary guy in the first one, and we want to go back to making a scary Saw movie again, with this omnipresent thing that Jigsaw had in the first film. But so it’s a really kind of like dig into that. And definitely we want to give the fans what they love about the whole franchise as well, whilst I think it’s very important we want to do something new and fresh that hasn’t been done before. That’s the sale. That’s my pitch.
The timetable for this plan is presently murky. While it’s clear that the next Saw movie is in active development, we know virtually nothing about how it’s coming together (beyond the involvement of Wan and Leigh Whannell) or when we can expect to see it. That being said, it was only last June that Blumhouse Productions acquired the franchise, so it’s definitely best to let the creatives cook and hopefully create another great film for the rejuvenated canon.
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