Last night at the Apple Store on Regent Street, Sam Raimi spoke to fans about his new movie, Oz the Great and the Powerful. During the course of the evening he also mentioned writing Evil Dead 4 this summer.
Earlier this morning, we spoke with Raimi at a junket for Oz the Great and the Powerful. During the course of our conversation, he cleared up exactly what happened at the Apple Store, denied the rumours, then teased us that it might actually be happening after all. Confused? Yerah, us too.
Quote reproduced in full below:
You’re going on to do Evil Dead 4, separately from the remake, aren’t you?
They made me say that last night at the Apple store. I’ve said that before, about that movie, and the fans go, ‘why do you keep talking about that? Why don’t you just make that thing already and stop talking?’ So I tried to stop talking about it, and last night at this Apple Store, some fan says, ‘are you making Evil Dead 4’, and I said, ‘I don’t really have a plan right now to do it’. So they say, ‘oh come on, do it! Do it’, ‘I could start writing it this summer with my brother’, who was in the audience, and they all go ’yeah we want the Evil Dead movie’, so I said, well, I guess’, and they said, ‘come on Sam’, so they kind of forced me to say that. I feel very funny. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me now; they could get mad at me now that I’m saying this.
So now fans are going to force you to write it and film it. It’s essentially going to be a film produced by a lynch mob.
Well last night my brother said, ‘why are you being such a jerk? You actually have a few people that want to see this project, you’re not that brilliant, give them what they damn well want. Why are you fighting?’ He had a good point.
Would that be conceivable though, when you have a parallel franchise starting out elsewhere?
I started wondering that last night, in the car ride home from that place. My brother said, because Fede Alvarez is not using the character of Ash, we could actually make Part 4 concurrently.
So it seems like Ted Raimi’s on board, even if Sam’s still a little reticent.
We’ll be running our full interview with Raimi next week, as well as interviews with James Franco, Zach Braff and Rachel Weisz. Check back then to find out what Raimi thinks of Amazing Spider-Man (he watched it last week).
