Filming on The Purge 4 kicked off in Buffalo, NY, the hometown of Cosmic Book News.
Crews began setting up for The Purge: Island on Monday unloading equipment near Clinton St. and Gorski St. in Buffalo.
The Purge: Island has a working title of “Island Experiment” and looks to be one of Buffalo’s biggest productions yet as it’s reported to involve hundreds of extras and local jobs.
The Purge: Island films here until November.
Casting for extras looks to already have been completed as an audition was held August 27th at the African American Cultural Center.
Plot details for The Purge: Island include that it will take place on Staten Island involving a 90% black cast described as “the first experimental Purge.”
“I think Island is the most crowd-pleasing of the films,” writer and director of the three previous Purge films, James DeMonaco, recently told Vulture, who returns to write and produce the fourth. “It’s so kick ass in its third act. What’s fun, too, is there’s an anti-hero. More than the previous films, there’s a singular hero in this movie. This is one man’s journey, William, an anti-hero inspired by Eastwood in Unforgiven, so it’s this very cool, modern, kind of badass who redeems himself through the story.
“I was wondering how you get people to stay for the first Purge, and what they do is they start monetizing it,” DeMonaco said. “People from Staten Island can easily go to Brooklyn for the evening, so what they do is start promising very decent sums of money for the very poor people in the neighborhood. It becomes a monetization of murder and violence, incentivizing killing and keeping people around for them to be victims. So you see the inception of how grotesque the idea of the Purge is, the manipulation upon the society… In fact, some people don’t think anything’s going to happen and then there’s this great twist [regarding] how they manipulate the evening.”
The Purge: Island has a July 4, 2018 release directed by Gerard McMurray, and a Purge TV series is also in development.
