The hiatus between films will be slightly longer this time, but to nobody's great surprise The Purge 3 was announced as heading our way last autumn. Series writer/director James Demonaco will once again be calling all the shots from his bunker at Blumhouse, and the film now has a release date of July 1, 2016{
That date, you'll notice, is Independence Day weekend: a mischievously appropriate slot for a series that satirises America as savagely as The Purge has so far. Should you be unaware by this point, the high concept is one night a year when US citizens can legally indulge their gun-nut bloodlust with a spree of consequence-free mayhem, up to and including murder. The tradition was inaugurated as a measure to reduce crime the rest of the year, by the mysterious and sinister governmental New Founding Fathers.
A lot of people miss the joke in that set-up, but so far it's proved malleable enough to allow for two very different films. The Purge was a contained home-invasion thriller and its sequel, The Purge: Anarchy, a broader-canvas street-level adventure more along the lines of The Warriors and Judgment Night.
There are threads from Anarchy that The Purge 3 could pick up (Frank Grillo could feasibly return, for example), but we could equally be looking at an anthology series where each instalment is only connected by the overarching concept. It doesn't always have to be about murder. A Purge film could take in a heist, a prison break, a kidnap/ransome... All bets are off.
Unsuprisingly there are no details yet forthcoming (and The Purge 3 is unlikely to be its title), and we'll almost certainly be kept in the dark until much nearer release. Currently its slot pits it against Tarzan, The BFG and Roland Emmerich's first Independence Day sequel, but The Purge has proved itself surprisingly resilient so far...