Chris Rock Is Rebooting The Saw Franchise For Some Reason
Hollywood is weird!
This is a pretty weird one so we might as well jump straight in: Chris Rock, as in Chris Rock the comedian, is rebooting the Saw franchise.
“I’ve been a fan of Saw since the first film in 2004,” said Rock in a statement. “I am excited by the opportunity to take this to a really intense and twisted new place.”
To be fair, there’s been a spate of comedians trying their hand at horror recently. John Krasinski, best-known for his turn on The Office, helmed the horror mega-hit A Quiet Place, while Danny McBride and David Gordon Green did an excellent job bringing the Halloween franchise back from the dead with their gigantic box office success uh, Halloween.
That said, Rock’s involvement in the Saw reboot is a little stranger. After all, Krasinski had had some success as a director of serious fare in the past — his debut, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, was a po-faced adaptation of a book of David Foster Wallace short stories. Gordon Green, meanwhile, got his start making weird, dark indie flicks before making a right turn into big budget studio comedies with Pineapple Express.
Seeing skepticism re: Chris Rock doing a SAW reboot and in response I'd just like to point to Danny McBride & David Gordon Green's HALLOWEEN, Matthew Holness' POSSUM, John Krasinski's A QUIET PLACE, and both of Jordan Peele's movies. Funny people ain't new to the horror genre.
— Scott Wampler™ (@ScottWamplerBMD) May 16, 2019
Rock, meanwhile, has mostly stuck in his own comedic lane. The most he’s diverged from wacky big budget laugh-a-thons is probably Good Hair, a documentary about barbershops and hair in the African-American community. And even then, jumping from that to a franchise about hideous torture and mutilation is a long, long stretch.
Weirder still is the idea that the Saw franchise needs rebooting at all. After a long hiatus, the series returned with 2017’s Jigsaw, a distinctly underrated but still commercially successful entry that racked up $103 million on a $10 million budget.
In any case, whether we like it or not, Rock — a longtime fan of the franchise, apparently — has already written a story outline for his reboot. He’ll be executive producing the thing, which is due to come out in 2020, though no director has been announced yet.
Weird!