Evil Dead Burn opens in theaters on July 10, 2026. Evil Dead Wrath arrives April 7, 2028. Both carry the same IP, the same producer in Rob Tapert, and almost nothing else in common. Same franchise. Radically different from everything else. That is the Evil Dead franchise expansion story that you need to know about.
Evil Dead Burn is a present-day family horror film directed by French filmmaker Sébastien Vaniček, who came to the franchise off his debut feature Infested (2023). A widow seeks solace with her in-laws; the in-laws become Deadites.
Evil Dead Wrath is already in the can, shot in New Zealand, set in 1972 (ten years before the original film’s timeline), directed by Francis Galluppi (The Last Stop in Yuma County), and visually designed to emulate Ektachrome 100 film stock. As Tapert put it:
It takes place in 1972. It will feel like a 1972 movie because the director and his DP want to imitate the film’s look and feel of something that’s called Ektachrome 100, which was a film stock.
No shared cast. No shared setting. No shared national production context, visual grammar, or tonal register. And Wrath is already drawing ratings-board concern, not for gore, but for something the franchise has never touched:
I think it’s going to be the one since the first Evil Dead movie that may have the most difficulty with the MPA.
Tapert told JoBlo.
“Least Blood, Most Brutality“: What Vaniček’s Vision Reveals About How the Franchise Works Now
The Burn creative brief is strange, and that strangeness is the point. According to Tapert,
It probably has the least amount of blood, but the most amount of brutality, and I would call it Serbian energy by any other name.
He is describing a horror film where the violence is psychological before it is physical, a tonal escalation that goes inward rather than outward. Vaniček cut one scene to secure the R rating; a more violent director’s cut is waiting for home video.
Vaniček came aboard off Infested, a French-language creature feature with no obvious Evil Dead DNA, and was handed the wheel. Tapert is explicit about what that meant: “Sébastien felt that he was given the green light by Sam [Raimi] and myself to make something totally different in the Evil Dead universe, which he did.” He adds:
It sits on the edge of the Evil Dead universe… he is a very strong filmmaker… There’s really great performances in it, and it is not tongue-in-cheek.
Vaniček’s own framing is even less franchise-speak. According to Dread Central, he told the studio: “I told the studio that I wanted to make a nasty film, a film that hurts, from which you come away tested.” He also said:
I’m going to put all the horror I have inside, it will be cathartic, and if I haven’t ruined my career and I can continue to make films behind it, I will move on to something other than horror!
That is someone treating the IP as a canvas and burning everything on it.
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The Auteur Laboratory, What Three Films Pointing in Three Directions Actually Means for Evil Dead Franchise Expansion
Pull back, and the pattern is hard to miss. Evil Dead Rise (2023) was directed by Irish filmmaker Lee Cronin, who had one prior feature (The Hole in the Ground, 2019), and moved the Deadites into a high-rise apartment complex, a radical break from the franchise’s cabin-in-the-woods origins.
Evil Dead Burn is a present-day psychological brutalist family drama from a French director. Evil Dead Wrath is a 1972 period prequel shot in New Zealand with a visual aesthetic borrowed from vintage film stock and coming-of-age sexual content that Tapert expects will challenge the MPA.
Three films. Three directors from outside the American mainstream horror. Three temporal settings. Three distinct tonal registers. Zero connective tissue, as far as we know, beyond the Deadites and the producers who keep handing the IP to filmmakers and stepping back.
That is an auteur laboratory, not a continuity machine. Each director, Tapert and Raimi, had a pronounced personal vision before taking the assignment, and each was apparently encouraged to follow it wherever it went. The producer’s own language across both films makes the strategy hard to read as accidental. On Wrath, Tapert said plainly:
This is yet another great departure. It predates everything.
“Yet another great departure” is a producer describing a pattern he recognizes and is actively sustaining. The Evil Dead franchise expansion is not about building a shared universe. It is about finding filmmakers with something to say and letting them say it, in whatever direction, decade, or country that takes them.