The Evil Dead franchise has been well-regarded for decades, but it’s also only just gotten back into the spotlight. We already knew at least two more movies are set to follow last year’s Evil Dead Rise, but it sounds like the series will further live on through animation.
During a recent Entertainment Weekly interview to promote his new show Hysteria, recurring leading man Bruce Campbell said an “animated version” of the horror franchise was currently in the works.” While he was mum on specifics, he said the show would let him keep playing Ash Williams, whose last major appearance was in the three-season series Ash vs. Evil Dead. He basically said he’s down to voice Ash “all day long,” mainly because his voice hasn’t changed over the decades like his body has.
Campbell already got the legacy sequel treatment with Ash vs., so it seems this show will be the only avenue to see his character going forward. Despite how that sounds, he thinks Evil Dead will be just fine without him, much like how it’s gotten on alright with Sam Raimi’s involvement. His only hope is that future movies remember what makes the series so special. “Take the elements that people like,” he said, “which is innocent people being tortured by a malicious entity, and it’s people who have no skills to stop it.”
Speaking of the future, Campbell offered some small teases for what’s in store with the next two movies. Earlier this year, we learned one of these is a spinoff from Sébastien Vaniček, and the other a wholly original tale written and directed by Francis Galluppi. Scripts for both films are basically ready to go, and Campbell said a single studio will finance and distribute both. There’s a greater effort to get these out the door since Evil Dead Rise had the best box office of the bunch at $146 million worldwide. And since audiences loved the “new incarnation” of the series, why not knuckle down and make sure there aren’t anymore 10-year gaps between entries?
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