Paramount has moved quickly to turn Longlegs into a franchise play, acquiring rights to a new film set in the horror hit’s universe and reuniting writer-director Osgood Perkins with Nicolas Cage. Perkins will write, direct and produce the project, while Cage will star and produce. The announcement lands less than two years after Longlegs opened as a breakout original horror title, earning about $128 million worldwide on a modest budget and giving Neon its biggest box-office hit.
What Paramount bought, at least for now, is a brand more than a finished roadmap. The new film is being described as set in the Longlegs universe, with story details still under wraps, leaving open whether it functions as a prequel, side story or a direct continuation.
Producers include Brian Kavanaugh Jones, Perkins and Chris Ferguson through their Phobos banner, and Dave Caplan under C2, which originated the rights. That lineup matters because it keeps the creative nucleus intact while shifting the property from its original distributor to a legacy studio with bigger franchise ambitions.
The move also cuts against the recent shape of Perkins’ career. Last year he launched Phobos and signed a first-look deal with Neon, which positioned that company as the home for projects he and Ferguson would produce.
Since Longlegs, Perkins has stayed busy inside that orbit, directing The Monkey, which also turned a profit theatrically, and wrapping The Young People for release next year. Paramount’s pickup does not erase that relationship, but it does show that a filmmaker who built his recent run through indie horror now has studio buyers chasing the same sensibility.
That is the real story here. Studios have spent years trying to industrialize horror IP, usually by leaning on remakes or familiar library titles. Longlegs came from a different path: an original film, sold through mood, mystery and Cage’s unnerving performance.
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Paramount is now betting that audiences responded to something durable enough to revisit. The challenge will be preserving the unnerving control that made the first film click while expanding a world that was built to feel singular, strange and hard to pin down.
