Another Unnecessary Texas Chainsaw Massacre Reboot May Be on the Way

Horror remakes and reboots are just part of the Hollywood genre landscape these days; sometimes, a fresh eye applied to familiar source material can yield a triumphant win, one recent example being Evil Dead Rise. More often, though, the cash-grab intentions shine through everything else.

One of the most frequently burned franchises is also one of horror’s oldest: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The most recent attempt to recapture that 1974 Tobe Hooper magic was a total bust, much like the attempts that preceded it, but that doesn’t mean someone else isn’t going to give it another try.

At least there’s an intriguing movie star attached to Deadline‘s report about Leatherface and company’s potential return: Glen Powell. He’s a native of Austin, Texas, where Hooper famously shot his two Chainsaw movies, and though he hasn’t done too many horror projects, he did break out on the TV horror-comedy series Scream Queens.

Deadline’s story is less update, more speculation, but there’s clearly some motion around a Texas Chainsaw remake if one of the big trades is digging into it. According to the story, “studios and filmmakers” alike have approached Verve, which has “repped the rights for the slasher series created by Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel since 2017,” about a fresh project involving cinema’s most famous cannibal crew.

However, a Verve representative was very light on details when speaking to the trade; they said a “a multimedia strategy for the seminal horror franchise” is in the works, but that “Verve has not officially submitted the property into any filmmakers, producers or buyers … packages are preemptively being brought to Verve.”

One of those packages is apparently the one involving Powell (as a potential star and producer) and writer-director J.T. Mollner, who made 2023 serial-killer tale Strange Darling, though “it’s very early days on this; no contracts or attachments as of yet, and the Mollner/Powell combo is but one interested party of many.”

We’ll keep you posted if we hear any more about Chainsaw—which stands at nine movies total in the franchise, though we like to pretend only the first two exist—news. But in the meantime, do you think this series needs a new movie… or should people just stick with the Hooper classics?

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