What The Until Dawn Filmmakers Would Like To See In The Future Of This Franchise

This post contains spoilers for the "Until Dawn" movie.

"Until Dawn," the return to the horror genre for "Lights Out" and "Annabelle: Creation" director David F. Sandberg (whose talents have been wasted in the superhero space for the past few years), doesn't play coy about wanting a sequel. 

In the movie's climax, the story's mysterious villain, Dr. Hill (played by Peter Stormare), violently explodes into guts and viscera after drinking a cup of coffee that was poisoned by our protagonist, Clover (Ella Rubin). The day has been saved, trauma has been confronted, closure has been achieved, and our heroes drive off into the metaphorical sunset. But the film ends with someone whistling the same tune Dr. Hill had whistled several times throughout, implying that he somehow survived his explosive death.

/Film's Bill Bria recently spoke with Sandberg about his work on the movie and he asked if the filmmaker thinks a sequel is possible, and Sandberg responded positively:

"Well, it's certainly possible because you could do so much more with it, and you could even do it with the new cast of characters in a different location. It's open for a lot. I mean, I don't know. I'm so focused just on one movie at a time, and then we'll see. You just want to do the best version of whatever you're doing at the time, but you certainly could, because there's a lot you could do with it."

But if screenwriter Gary Dauberman, with whom /Film also spoke in that same interview, has his way, the "Until Dawn" franchise will become a lot more ambitious in the coming years.

Gary Dauberman has been a mainstay in the horror space for years now, having written Blumhouse's "Annabelle" trilogy, both chapters of Andy Muschietti's successful "It" adaptation, "The Nun," and the remake of "Salem's Lot," the latter of which he also directed. When he was asked the same question about the possibility of a sequel to "Until Dawn," he laid out his desire to see a situation in which the games and movies all take place on one timeline.

"I'm hoping that there's a new game that's part of the story," Dauberman shared. "My ideal scenario is that there's a game, a movie, a game, a movie or a TV [show], whatever it is. But just really building it out in all different kinds of media, I think, is what's exciting. [Right now], it's the game franchise over here, it's a movie franchise over here. I really like the idea of it being just one interconnected franchise."

The movie takes quite a different approach than the game (which could explain why the game's creators weren't given any credit on the movie), and I personally like the idea of alternating stories in these two mediums that each do their own thing and then maybe share a single character as a piece of connective tissue, almost how HBO's "The White Lotus" carries at least one character through from one season to the next. We saw that happen with Stormare's Dr. Hill in both the game and the movie, so the template is there to do something similar again with sequels ... should this film be successful enough to warrant them, of course.

"Until Dawn" is in theaters now.