The Black Phone continues to ring. The 2022 adaptation of Joe Hill’s story was one of last year’s most profitable movies, and naturally, a sequel is on the way. Deadline reports that a possibly surprising number of actors will be returning for the phone’s next ring: Ethan Hawke, Mason Thames, Madeleine McGraw, Jeremy Davies, and Miguel Mora.
What does this mean, story-wise? No one can say just yet. As Deadline succinctly put it, “In the first movie, a 13-year old boy, who is abducted by a child killer in a suburban neighborhood and locked in a soundproof basement, begins to receive calls on a disconnected phone from the killer’s previous victims.” More victims? More kidnappings? More traumatized kids?
Director Scott Derrickson is also returning, along with his Black Phone co-writer C. Robert Cargill. Joe Hill is one of the executive producers on the film, which will, like the first one, be produced by Jason Blum and Blumhouse.
Leah Schnelbach wrote of the first film, “What got me was that the horror in The Black Phone is human. It’s real people doing horrible things to other real people who can’t really protect themselves, not ghosts climbing out of TV sets or hapless teens reading from clearly cursed books. There was no point where I could yell, ‘Don’t go in there, you idiot!’ because I would have been yelling at helpless children who were the victims of circumstance and bad parenting.”
Pick up The Black Phone 2 in summer 2025.
