Should The Cabin in the Woods get a sequel? I asked Drew Goddard, and he told me that, in all honesty, his opinion changes daily.
Drew Goddard directed The Cabin in the Woods in 2012, from a screenplay he co-wrote with Joss Whedon. The immensely clever meta horror film deconstructed the clichés of the genre while setting five archetypal characters in the cabin in the woods, without telling them they were part of a much larger experiment. Those who love Cabin adore it. (Full disclosure: It was the No. 1 movie on my year-end Top 10 the year it came out.) So when I sat down with Goddard at the Toronto International Film Festival, I asked him if he and Whedon had ideas for The Cabin in the Woods 2. He told me:
They want to make one. I think Joss… we talked about it. I think we just don’t want to, we don’t want to fuck it up.I mean, I think, I’ve always felt this way. Not everything needs to be a franchise. You know, like we only want to make it if we’re excited about it. I don’t care, I don’t think we need to do it. It’s more about, is there something that excites us? You know, that universe is pretty exciting, so we talk about it from time to time. I don’t know.If I had to put odds, the tricky part with Joss and I, especially, is it all depends on how we wake up in the morning. If we wake up… I can easily see us over drinks tomorrow going like, ‘Hey, what if we did this?’ But I can also see us being like, ‘The movie is pretty good. We don’t need to revisit it.’
I’m equally torn. As much as I loved The Cabin in the Woods, I wouldn’t want Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon revisiting the storyline for the sake of squeezing sequel money out of their clever premise. Cabin wasn’t a massive hit, but it made enough money ($66M internationally) to warrant a sequel. Critics dug it (it has a 91% Fresh grade), but we’ll feverishly turn on a sequel if it strikes us as lazy. Real talk here, people.
Now might be the time to strike, though. Joss Whedon has ended his Marvel duties. And after The Martian, Drew Goddard’s resume has a number of potential projects on the horizon – from Cloverfield 2 to Robopocalypse -- but they could be shelved in favor of Cabin in the Woods 2. Now all they need is that one big idea that motivates them to move forward. Let’s see if it happens.
