Rings

Some very big horror movies inspired some totally forgotten sequels.

Have you ever seen those movie ads on TV filled with gushing quotes from critics and thought to yourself, “I saw that movie; it was terrible. Where did they find these positive reviews?” If you have, you’re not alone — and you’re going to love ScreenCrush’s newest series, Critics Are Raving!, which balances the cinematic scales with trailers full of slightly more accurate (and slightly more negative) lines from reviews. Real critics. Real quotes. Really bad movies. That’s what’s Critics Are Raving! is all about.

When M. Night Shyamalan’s Split exceeded expectations and became the first big hit of 2017, box office prognosticators wondered if this was the result of a killer marketing campaign or if audiences actually liked the movie. The second weekend made it definitive: Split’s small drop-off indicated positive buzz and strong word-of-mouth, both of which allowed the film to remain on top of the charts for the third weekend in a row, narrowly edging out all newcomers, specifically Rings.

The Ring sequel no one was asking for is about to hit theaters, and if watching a movie about people dying because they watched a movie appeals to you, you probably want to check out the full first scene Paramount released today. It features a doomed plane, some doomed people, and a girl crawling out of a — well, you know the rest.

Any contemporary sequel to The Ring would have to incorporate the internet, and why not? It just makes sense. Destroying a videotape is one thing, but how do you stop a haunted video once it’s been uploaded to the seemingly infinite void known as the worldwide web? You can’t. Such is the premise for Rings, the repeatedly-delayed sequel to Gore Verbinski’s 2002 remake of the Japanese horror classic which has a brand-new trailer ahead of its February release.

It’s not a great time to be a horror sequel. Blair Witch made just $9.5 in its debut in theaters last weekend (less than Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 made in its opening weekend 15 years ago), and now Variety reports that Paramount is pushing back two long-delayed installments in the horror franchises for The Ring and Friday the 13th.

It’s been over a decade since the last film in The Ring saga, 2005’s poorly received The Ring Two. The franchise, about a deadly VHS tape with strange, surreal contents and the long-haired ghost tied to it, has been dormant ever since, but you know how it is; these types of hauntings (particularly ones that have been quite lucrative for a film studio in the past) never stay dead for long. The Ring makes a serious comeback this fall. The main ghost from the series co-stars in a crossover horror film with the ghost from The Grudge called Sadako vs. Kayako, which plays at the Toronto Film Festival next month. And the American Ring franchise is back up and running too with Rings from director F. Javier Gutierrez (Before the Fall).

Surprise — Paramount has delayed the release date of their upcoming sequel to The Ring yet again, marking the third time that the studio has assigned a new release date to Rings, following a series of shifts for their long-developing Friday the 13th reboot / sequel / who-knows-what-it-is-anymore. Rings will now hit theaters this October…supposedly, maybe, possibly, we’ll see.

Before you die, you see... release delays. There’s nothing scarier than that.

Although it was recently rumored that Rings would operate as a prequel or origin story of sorts, it’s been confirmed that the film is actually very much a sequel. New details have been revealed about the upcoming film, which has just added Big Bang Theory star Johnny Galecki (the artist formerly known as David From Roseanne) to the cast.