With a few years behind him, co-writer/director Marcus Dunstan has a hopeful update for The Collected. Dunstan co-created the horror movie series with frequent writing partner Patrick Melton under the initial name The Midnight Man, which was at one point read by the producers of the Saw franchise for a potential prequel. Though they wouldn't move forward with it, Dunstan and Melton would go on to both join the long-running horror franchise as the primary writers for Saw IV through The Final Chapter and rework The Midnight Man into 2009's The Collector in between.
The Collector movies primarily center on Josh Stewart's Arkin O'Brien, a former convict desperate to pay off a debt who tries to rob a house, only to find the titular psychopath having set up gruesome traps around the house. The 2012 sequel, The Collection, sees Arkin escape from The Collector's base and subsequently hired by a wealthy man to help rescue his daughter from the horrific location. Both The Collector and The Collection received generally negative reviews from critics and though the second underperformed at the box office, a third installment has languished in development hell, but may be closer to happening.
While speaking exclusively with Screen Rant for his new film Unhuman, Marcus Dunstan shared a hopeful update for The Collected. The co-writer/director revealed interest has renewed in the horror threequel and that plans are in the works to try and get the film back on track. See what Dunstan shared below:
"You know, I wouldn't waste anyone's hopes, especially my own, and we've got hope. Here's what's great, there are folks working on getting that back and it's just taken a long time. It's been slow and I think there's a lot of things to untangle, but we're going to use our time to hope that it all works out, because we got a chance. The coolest thing is you don't know all the time if, when you get out, this lofty goal will work. So it's like, there's no reason to do another one unless it can be the best one. Then, man, we get this tease back after going like, 'Holy cow!' We never stopped talking and thinking in this universe and it was like, 'Okay, there's something here that I would fall on the sword for every day' and I love that, that felt right. So that also keeps my hopes way high, I'm dreaming for it. I want to do that, I think that would be great."
Development on The Collected has been a bumpy road, with original studio LD Entertainment originally ordering the film two years after The Collection hit theaters only for it to die in 2018. The horror threequel would initially find new life a year later as Dunstan and Melton forged ahead with Stewart returning alongside sequel star Emma Fitzpatrick and Halloween III: Season of the Witch star Tom Atkins set as Arkin's father. Initially kicking off production in late 2019, The Collected shut down filming within eight days as props were stolen from the set and the producers were no longer contacting Dunstan.
Dunstan's latest comments regarding The Collected should come as welcome news for fans of the horror franchise, especially when compared to last year when the filmmaker expressed doubts of picking it back up due to seeming disinterest from the producers. With the unique subsection of torture-based horror seeing some renewed popularity thanks to the latest Saw movie Spiral and the upcoming Hellraiser reboot, it makes sense there may be some new interest in The Collector 3 and give genre fans the trilogy closer they've been eager to see since The Collection's cliffhanger ending. While audiences await further word on the film, they can revisit both The Collector and The Collection streaming on Prime Video now.