Ari Aster has a Hereditary prequel sitting in a drawer — and for now, that’s exactly where it’s staying.
Speaking at a Q&A during the American Cinematheque’s Bleak Week festival in Los Angeles, which screened several of his films including Midsommar: Director’s Cut, Beau Is Afraid, and Eddington, Aster confirmed he wrote a prequel to his 2018 debut feature but has no plans to develop it. “I wrote a prequel to this,” he told the audience. “It never feels like the right time. It’s a prequel, not a sequel, so I don’t know where this goes.”
Released in 2018, Hereditary broke box office records for A24 at the time and has since amassed more than $90 million worldwide. The occult psychological horror follows a family unraveling in grief as sinister forces close in, and stars Toni Collette, Alex Wolff, Milly Shapiro, Ann Dowd, and Gabriel Byrne.
The revelation is unlikely to satisfy fans hungry for more of the Graham family mythology — but Aster’s attention is plainly elsewhere. He has completed a script for his next feature, Scapegoat, which will again be distributed by A24 and produced through his Square Peg banner with partner Lars Knudsen. Plot details remain under wraps. Scarlett Johansson, Aster’s first choice for the lead role, is attached to star, with production targeting a late 2026 start to work around her commitments to Mike Flanagan’s Exorcist reboot and The Batman Part II opposite Robert Pattinson.
The pairing comes after Aster publicly acknowledged that his last two films — Beau Is Afraid and Eddington — were received less warmly than his first two, and that the gap was “devastating” to him. Eddington, his satirical neo-Western starring Joaquin Phoenix, Emma Stone, and Pedro Pascal, earned roughly $14 million against a $25 million budget when it released in 2025. The A24 partnership has nonetheless endured, now stretching across five consecutive features.
Scapegoat marks Johansson’s first return to A24 in 13 years, following her critically celebrated but commercially underwhelming 2013 collaboration with the studio on Under the Skin.
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The Bleak Week retrospective underscored the cult standing Aster commands despite his mixed commercial record. His comments about the Hereditary prequel — written but indefinitely shelved — suggest a filmmaker more interested in moving forward than mining a proven property, even as the horror genre increasingly turns to established IP for safe returns.
