CRAWL 2 Finds Its Gator Chow With ONE PIECE Star Emily Rudd and SCREAM Survivor Mason Gooding
Looks like the gators are hungry again, and Paramount has finally found two unfortunate humans to put on the menu.
After years of waiting for Crawl 2 to claw its way out of development, Alexandre Aja’s sequel to his wonderfully nasty 2019 creature feature is getting ready to roll.
This time, Emily Rudd and Mason Gooding will be the ones attempting to keep all of their limbs attached while some very large, very angry reptiles hunt them down.
Gooding should already have a decent survival-horror résumé by this point. He’s a veteran of the Scream franchise, where he played Chad Meeks-Martin, and he recently appeared in I Want Your Sex and 72 Hours. Apparently surviving Ghostface was simply preparation for the next logical career move: fighting alligators.
Rudd is best known to a lot of fans as Nami in Netflix’s One Piece, but she’s also spent some time running around the horror genre. She appeared in Netflix’s Fear Street trilogy and will next venture into dangerous waters with the upcoming underwater thriller Whalefall.
Now Rudd and Gooding are jumping into Aja’s latest aquatic nightmare together. Production on Crawl 2 is expected to begin later this month in Hungary, but the sequel won’t be returning to the storm-ravaged Florida setting of the first movie. Instead, the gators are taking a trip to New York City.
The original Crawl followed Haley Keller, played by Kaya Scodelario, as she attempted to rescue her father during a Category 5 hurricane, only to discover that rising floodwaters weren’t the biggest problem waiting inside the family home. A pack of hungry alligators had moved in, turning the flooded house into one hell of a reptilian death trap.
The movie was a lean, mean survival-horror flick, and audiences showed up for it. Crawl earned $91 million worldwide, which made the possibility of another round of humans versus gators pretty easy to understand.
Paramount has been working to make the sequel happen since 2024. At the time, Aja said he intended to tackle the project following the release of Never Let Go, and now the wheels are finally turning.
Moving the carnage from Florida to New York also gives Aja a much bigger playground. The idea of a major disaster flooding parts of the Big Apple while alligators start treating the streets like an all-you-can-eat buffet sounds exactly like the kind of ridiculous creature-feature setup that could make Crawl 2 a blast.
Aja certainly has a thing for putting people in water with creatures that want to eat them. Along with Crawl 2, the filmmaker is also set to direct Under Paris 2, the follow-up to the Netflix horror thriller about a giant shark terrorizing people in the Seine.
Apparently sharks in Paris and alligators in New York are both perfectly reasonable ways for Aja to spend his working hours, and I respect the commitment.
He’s also co-writing the upcoming Dead by Daylight movie, based on the hit asymmetrical multiplayer horror game. Thordur Palsson is currently attached to direct that adaptation.
There’s still plenty we don’t know about Crawl 2, including who Rudd and Gooding are playing and exactly how the alligators end up terrorizing New York. But putting two actors with horror experience at the center of Aja’s next round of reptile mayhem is a promising start.
The first Crawl worked because it didn’t need to make things complicated. There was a hurricane, a rapidly flooding house, some vicious gators, and people desperately trying not to become dinner. Taking that basic survival formula and unleashing it on New York could be a hell of a lot of fun.
Now bring on the gators.
Source: THR