Saw Meets Fight Club: Darren Lynn Bousman shares pitch for unmade Saw sequel
Saw II, Saw III, Saw IV, Spiral – Darren Lynn Bousman has directed a lot of movies in the Saw franchise, but during a recent chat with Josh Stolberg (who co-wrote the scripts for Jigsaw, Spiral, and Saw X) on an episode of the Darren & Josh Make a Movie podcast, Bousman revealed that he once presented Lionsgate with a pitch for a Saw sequel that was never made. A story that could be described as “Saw Meets Fight Club.”
The Pitch
In the podcast episode, there is some confusion between Bousman and Stolberg as to whether this pitch would be an “unmade Saw 8” (replacing Jigsaw) or an alternative version of Saw X, or if it would have been the ninth movie, as Bousman says the project pivoted into Spiral territory when Chris Rock revealed that he wanted to work on a Saw movie. Whatever the case, here’s the pitch, as described by Bousman:
“Basically, the opening scene was the desecration of all the totems from Saw. I had this idea, and I tried to get us to do it in Spiral as well. I think I pitched this to you too. I love this idea that it starts off and you see all of these men, kind of in the way Saw II begins, these SWAT team members getting ready. You see these men putting on the… what’s it called? Balaclavas. They’re putting on these things. You’re seeing them strap up with guns. Then it cuts to the middle of the night: these black SUVs turning off their lights, stopping the cars. They knock on a door, and then every living character you’ve seen… so you go to all the characters who have ever lived in a Saw film…. are being executed door to door. Ding-dong, Cary Elwes, boom, boom, drops down. All these characters are being executed. You’re seeing these black SUVs all over, and it’s cutting, cutting, cutting.
They finally go to this warehouse and go inside. There are all the traps of John Kramer laid out. You’re seeing them basically take the traps out, remove all these things. They finally get to this room, and there’s Billy. You see Billy, and the camera is pushing in on Billy, pushing in on Billy. As they push in, you see them take Billy and throw him into a duffel bag. Cut to the cover of darkness. They’re going into a trash compactor dumpster, and all these things are being thrown in. The last thing that’s thrown in is Billy. It’s crushing, then it smashes, and then it says (the title).
The idea was that they were going to try to kill Jigsaw’s message by removing anyone who could have been an accomplice, any piece of iconography that people could have worshipped. The premise was Fight Club. Four or five years pass, and Fight Club-style arenas pop up all around the United States and the world, where YouTube videos get put up. It started right after Jigsaw’s stuff gets crushed.
It cuts to a guy in a suit walking through a house. He goes into a garage, and it’s all closed off. You see him loosen his tie, take his button-down shirt off, nicely fold it, take his pants off and fold them. There’s a coffin. He opens it, and inside the coffin are spikes lining it. He takes a deep breath, goes inside the coffin, and then it’s rapid-fire Saw style, he’s getting cut and bleeding. You see he’s got to turn his body over and grab a key. You see him struggle, but he eventually gets the key out and unlocks the coffin.
When the coffin opens, there are all these people around cheering and clapping. They’ve got videos up. Cameras are out. Then it pulls out and we see 100 views, 1,000 views, 10,000 views, a million views, and these are popping up all over the place. They can’t stop Jigsaw’s message because it became viral. So it was kind of a Fight Club thing.”
Bousman plotted out the pitch with Abattoir screenwriter Christopher Monfette and even showed animatics to the Lionsgate executives (and those animatics can be seen in the podcast video), but Lionsgate wasn’t into it. “They said, ‘We already let you kill Jigsaw once. We’re not going to do it again with this.’ So they never did it.“
So Bousman didn’t get to make that particular Saw movie. The next one we’re going to see will be from the creators of the original film, James Wan and Leigh Whannell. Wan and Whannell moved on from that franchise after Saw III, but when creative disagreements between the producers at Twisted Pictures brought the development of Saw XI to a screeching halt, Blumhouse Productions swooped in and picked up the rights to the franchise. And since Blumhouse recently merged with Wan’s production company Atomic Monster, they’re bringing Wan and Whannell back into the picture.
What do you think of Bousman’s pitch for the unmade Saw sequel? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
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