A sequel to Truth or Dare was in the works that would have featured a New Nightmare twist, but it was scrapped during the pandemic.
After Truth or Dare made $95 million on a budget of $3.5 million, a follow-up felt like a no-brainer, but it never happened. However, according to Variety, a Truth or Dare sequel did almost happen before the plug was pulled at the last minute.
Truth or Dare follows a group of college students who play a game of truth or dare while on vacation in Mexico, only to realize it has deadly consequences if they don’t follow through on their obligations. The young cast bonded during production and gave director Jeff Wadlow the idea for a very meta sequel in the vein of Wes Craven’s New Nightmare.
“We actually wrote a ‘Truth or Dare’ sequel,” Wadlow said. “In the first one, there’s about nine characters and seven of them die, and I didn’t want to do a ‘Final Destination’-style sequel, or ‘Truth or Dare’ and it’s happening again to a different group of people. It just seemed kind of boring to me.”
The director continued: “[The cast] had become great friends and were going on trips together, hanging out in Big Bear. They had this idea: ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if ‘Truth or Dare’ happened to us while we were on vacation together, the actors?’ The joke became that the sequel should be called ‘Truth or Big Bear.’ I thought that was kind of a brilliant idea.“
So we wrote this script — ‘Truth or Dare IRL’ — and it begins with Markie and Olivia, Lucy and Violett’s characters. They’re in this scene, and it feels like our ‘Final Destination’ kind-of ‘Truth or Dare’ scene, and Markie starts laughing in the middle of it. You hear, ‘Cut!’ and the director walks on the set, and we do the ‘New Nightmare’ treatment where we reveal that Lucy and Violett are still friends. They’re going to go on this trip with the other actors from ‘Truth or Dare,’ with Tyler, Landon and Sam. Everyone who was in the first film, they’re all buddies, and we find out what happened is the writers of the first film had researched a real demon. Just as Calux can haunt a game in the film, he’s now decided to haunt a movie in the real world. It was scary and surreal and funny and played a lot with subjectivity.
Wadlow planned to film the sequel in a cabin on the Universal lot, but this was during the height of COVID, which meant that the cast and crew would have had to quarantine. They were prepared to do what was needed to get it done, but the risks were too much for Blumhouse and Universal to take on at the time. “There’s this one cabin on the Universal lot where they’ve shot a million things — we were going to take over that cabin,” Wadlow said. “But I think they started to realize that the health and safety risks involved at that moment, and also the cost implications of basically not letting people leave, would mean everyone was on overtime for the entire shoot, and they pulled the plug on it.“
At this point, Wadlow doesn’t think the Truth or Dare sequel will ever happen as “too much time has passed.“