The Director of ‘Annabelle: Creation’ Wants to Tackle ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’
Annabelle: Creation absolutely (and appropriately) slaughtered the competition at the weekend box office, grossing an impressive $35 million in its debut in theaters. That’s a tiny drop from the first Annabelle, and one of the strongest horror debuts of 2017. With success like that, director David F. Sandberg, who previously directed last summer’s surprise horror hit Lights Out, has a lot more power to pick his projects. And he has a few possibilities in mind.
Answering questions on Reddit recently about any franchise he’d want to play with in the future, Sandberg said he had a few ideas:
I've been thinking about what fun franchises New Line has like A Nightmare on Elm street and Critters. Might be fun if you took something like that in a different direction from previous installments. Like instead of remaking Nightmare you do some continuation of it in the same world kind of thing.
This is an interesting idea. The last Nightmare on Elm Street movie was seven years ago; the reboot directed by Samuel Bayer and starring Jackie Earle Haley as brutally scarred child abuser and finger-knife enthusiast Freddy Krueger. So that would be the exact opposite of what Sandberg would be interested in doing. He seems to be thinking of something more in a legacyquel vein, perhaps with new characters, or maybe even a new central villain.
In this case, that seems wise. It’s hard to top the pure and perfect brilliance of the original Nightmare on Elm Street by the late Wes Craven. As Bayer and Haley learned the hard way.