The Purge series has become a yearly cinema installment, with its most recent film “The Purge: Election Year” hitting theatres in July of 2016.
The box office smash about a future in which all crime is legal for a twelve hour period known as “The Purge” became the lowest budget film to hit the top of the box office since 1988, and has so far spawned three movies, with a prequel on the way.
The film’s director James DeMonaco, however, will be taking “The Purge” franchise to the small screen sometime in the near future.
In an interview with media news outlet CinemaBlend, DeMonaco confirmed a TV franchise is in the works, responding. “Dude, it’s so weird you bring that up. Yes! Not an anthology… I guess kind of an anthology — more of an interwoven anthology. They came to me about a TV show, my idea is that you do six or seven storylines. And I would kind of intercut them, use flashbacks.”
Demonaco is hopeful that the format of television, rather than film, will be the ideal format to dig into the mindset of a “purger” and focus more on character development rather than a 3-arc story structure. Says DeMonaco, “The idea of why I like the idea of a maybe 10 hour TV thing on this, the one thing you really can’t do on the films is, just because of mere real estate and time, is you can’t get into the nuance and complexity that would drive someone to commit a terrible act on this night. Whether it’s revenge or out of passion, but what might be interesting in a TV show is with a flashback narrative, if you start on Purge Night but you go back to show how people have gotten to where they are. Where you see a couple that’s gone haywire on this night, but let’s show everything that’s led up to this moment of a husband trying to kill a wife — the cheating or the accusations of cheating or money problems. It will be interesting to show those arcs, those dramatic and complex arcs that get people to where they pick up a gun or a knife and kill someone else. I think there’s something cool that we can do with the real estate of TV — 10 hours, potentially.”
Fans of “The Purge” franchise won’t have to wait long for this series, according to DeMonaco, who confirms the idea is already “pretty far ahead” with network executives, though no specifics have been confirmed.
The Purge television series promises a greater look into the lore the possibility for new characters being incorporated between the movies and the television show.
For fans of the series who need more purging in their lives now, the Blu-Ray of “The Purge: Election Year” will be hitting stores on October 4th.
