Apparently insatiable for the delicious, refrigerated leftovers—of MURDER—Eli Roth is all set to return to the Thanksgiving table. The director announced on social media today that he’s now on the books to write and direct a 2025 sequel to his recent slasher flick, which was one of the more pleasant surprises of the recent holiday weekend. (Surprising, at least in part, because it’s been a minute since Roth put out a movie that was just a pure fun genre exercise, with the film offering up a slightly more modernized take on classic “It’s a holiday, let’s kill some people” slasher fare.)
As we are contractually obligated to note, Thanksgiving was the third movie to come to theaters after initially being teased as a joke trailer in Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse, with the previous two being Rodriguez’s own Machete movies, and then Jason Eisener’s Hobo With A Shotgun. Which demands the question, Edgar Wright: When the hell are we getting a feature-length version of Don’t?
Anyway, Thanksgiving was enough of a hit, at least in terms of horror movie money, to get greenlit for a second outing. (Which is to say that it cost $15 million to make and brought in $30 million, in that gloriously bloody part of Hollywood where you’re allowed to do that kind of thing.) Of course, we won’t see the movie for another year; Roth still has to write the thing, and he does have that feature adaptation of video game series Borderlands that he’s been working on for basically forever at this point, and which is due out some time in 2024. (Meanwhile, no word on whether Thanksgiving star Patrick Dempsey will be on board for a sequel, but we can live in stuffing-flavored hope.)