Could New Strangers Trilogy Be Packaged as One 4+ Hour Movie? Yes!

Since all three new films for The Strangers trilogy were filmed over 52 days by director Renny Harlin, could a massive 4-hour supercut of the film ever reach theaters? According to Harlin and Lionsgate’s Geobert Abboud in a recent article for Variety, the answer is “Yes!”

When producer Courtney Solomon attained the rights to The Strangers, he crafted a huge 285-page script that told a much larger story than the original 2008 film.

“In order to tell it you’re gonna need to go back to the great original,” Solomon says. “It’s the primal nature of the original concept, these three random people and unexplained, random acts of violence, which is just so terrifying and real. I don’t know if you can improve upon that, so why don’t we take that basic premise as a starting point and modify it for a bigger story that becomes proper, character-driven horror. You need to spend time with both protagonists and antagonists.”

The Strangers: Chapter 1 will debut in theaters May 17, 2024, with Chapter 2 releasing later this fall and Chapter 3 arriving in early 2025. The plan to film and release a full trilogy within a year’s span came quickly to Lionsgate, but they still wanted to explore the longer binge-watching experience for theater-goers, with Abboud saying there is “some version of that we’ve discussed at a high level that we’d like to see at some point.”

“It’s in our heads,” adds Harlin. “This is definitely what we want to do. We want to cut together the full arc. We know exactly how to do it, then we’ll create a movie and see who are those diehard fans who will come to the movie theater for four and a half hours. I don’t know if we need to have an intermission so people can get some food and go to the bathroom, but I definitely want to have that event and see if people take four and a half hours of dread and fear and terror and despair.”