Details Revealed For THE PURGE: THE ISLAND, Which Will Tell The Story of the First Purge Night
There's a fourth Purge movie in the works called The Purge: The Island and during a recent interview with Vulture, writer and director James DeMonaco opened up about the direction he plans on taking the story.
This next movie will be a prequel and it will tell the story of the very first, experimental Purge night. DeMonaco says:
“I said it’s the first experimental Purge, which I don’t know if I was supposed to say, but now I’ve said it, so you have it. Next July 4, it’ll be coming.”
According to the report, the film will be set on Staten Island and will "demonstrate how the New Founding Fathers’s batshit crazy plan to rescue a dying economy turned into a national holiday in which all crime — including rape and murder — is legal for one whole night each year."
For the most part, I've enjoyed the films in the Purge franchise and I've always been curious about how this whole Purge thing got started. So... I'm in! I'm interested in seeing how the madness of this whole thing came together.
He goes on to reveal that cash incentives were offered to the first participants of The Purge. He explains:
“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. 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, and the manipulation upon the society.”
DeMonaco then explains the basic story arc of the main character who is described as being like Clint Eastwood's character from Unforgiven.
“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 [who] was inspired by Eastwood in Unforgiven, so it’s this very cool, modern kind of badass who redeems himself through the story.”
After saying that The Purge: The Island would be the most “crowd-pleasing” of the Purge films and saying “It’s so kick ass in its third act." He opens up a bit about the Purge TV series saying that it will be set in the middle period of the Purge timeline between the very first “experimental purge” and the events of Election Year.
“The movies are more like events. 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. 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 … Ten hours is allowing us to get deeper into character and deeper into why people would actually consider violence as an option ever.”
If your a fan of the Purge franchise, there's a lot of cool stuff coming. The series and the film will arrive sometime next year. I'll be looking forward to them.