The Collector franchise was set to become a trilogy as filming had begun in Atlanta on The Collected back in September of 2019. It’s unclear what caused production to shut down, but at one point, it was set to resume earlier this year in Vancouver, Canada. It hasn’t…and the filmmakers are pissed.
Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton both returned to write the script, and Dunstan was once again directing. They had only completed eight days of filming, the duo revealed on Sean Clark’s The Thing With Two Heads podcast, adding that the film is in peril with producers allegedly ignoring all calls and emails.
“Well, we shot for eight days, and then it was shut down,” Dunstan told the podcast, who also shared disturbing details. “I invested in this thing, I’d like to know what’s happening. We stopped hearing from anybody with the production. I know most of the props I brought there have been stolen. I would think that anybody else who invested in this movie that thinks that it’s happening, wouldn’t they like to know what’s happening? .. All calls and emails have gone unanswered .. When you can’t get anyone on the phone and you don’t hear anything, at this point, I’m really p*ssed off.”
“We actually stopped shooting in 2019,” Melton added. “That was two years ago, and we only shot eight days, so [there’s only been] very, very little shot. Anything that’s been released has been from that time period, and there’s no plans to start shooting it. We haven’t talked to anyone who was in the production… we’d love to finish it, but, I don’t know. We’re not the producers, so we don’t know.”
Movieweb, who transcribed the aforementioned bits of the interview, also notes that a teaser was created using the eight days of footage, although “it still needs color timing, music rights, and some VFX” and that “finishing the teaser will require the producer giving the project the greenlight to resume, so that footage will remain on the shelf for now.”
Even worse, “Because the producer owns the rights, Dunstan and Melton cannot move on with the sequel without his involvement.”
Josh Stewart and Emma Fitzpatrick were both reprising their roles with Randy Havens (“Stranger Things”, Godzilla: King of the Monsters), Dot-Marie Jones (“American Horror Story”, 3 From Hell) and Navi Rawat (Feast, The Collection).
Bloody Disgusting exclusively reported that horror legend Tom Atkins (Night of the Creeps, Halloween III, My Bloody Valentine 3D) also has a starring role.
At the end of The Collection, Stewart’s Arkin quite literally collected the Collector, so the third film’s title was pretty perfect.