The Purge franchise has grossed over $300 million at the box office and doesn’t look close to slowing down as it’s learned the fourth film will be set on Staten Island and aptly titled The Purge: Island, in addition to The Purge TV series being in development.
Director James DeMonaco is onboard The Purge: Island this time as writer-only and shares new details with Vulture including it will have a 90 percent black cast, starts shooting in two weeks for its next 4th of July release, and is described as “the first experimental Purge.”
“I think Island is the most crowd-pleasing of the films,” DeMonaco says. “It’s so kick a– 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.”
James DeMonaco also offers some potential plot point in that this time around for The Purge: Island people are rounded up for money.
” I was wondering how you get people to stay for the first Purge, and what they do is they start monetizing it. 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,” says DeMonaco. “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.”
Regarding The Purge TV show, James DeMonaco offers it will be set within the middle of the Purge timelines, when just over six of the Purge events have taken place.
“In the TV show, I think we’re slowing it down, and we’re using this flashback structure to enter into the non-Purge lives of these people,” says DeMonaco. “We’re going back six months or two years or into their childhood to see some things that might’ve fed into their decision-making on this particular Purge. The long form is actually allowing it to become more of a character study, which is kind of cool, instead of a singular event of surviving the night. We have a black female lead. We have a young Puerto Rican brother and sister. We have an Asian character. It’s opening [the story] up, in a way. Ten hours is allowing us to get deeper into character, and deeper into why people would actually consider violence as an option. We’ll see it next year.”
