The Saw franchise has always had a reputation for being intense, gory, and generally hard to watch. Nevertheless, audiences keep coming back to see the twisted traps Jigsaw creates to punish his victims. But as the movies have moved from director to director and the story has taken countless improbable twists and turns, the spirit of the Saw movies has drifted from where it began.
Now, the franchise’s co-creator is involved again for the first time in 20 years, and he’s spoken about how he intends to bring the franchise back to basics. James Wan may be best known today for his work with the Aquaman and Insidious movies, but he got his start co-directing Saw with Leigh Whannell back in 2004. He returned to co-write Saw III in 2026, but otherwise, he’s been largely uninvolved with the movie’s sequels. That’s about to change now that Blumhouse Productions has bought Twisted Pictures’ stake in the franchise.
Leigh Whannell and James Wan are returning to the franchise they created.
Just how will this affect future Saw movies? It’s no secret that the franchise has floundered in recent years, and a proposed script for a movie focused on healthcare industry bigshots never made it out of development. James Wan may have a fix. In an interview with Letterboxd, he laid out how he sees the motivations of franchise villain Jigsaw, and how that understanding will inform his new direction.
“Leigh and I both want to recapture the spirit of that first film and revisit Jigsaw’s philosophy, which is that he goes after people who don’t appreciate their lives,” Wan said. “If you’re a scumbag, but you appreciate your life, he doesn’t see you as someone who’s wasting your life, so I want to go back to what we touched on in the first movie with regard to that.”
Jigsaw, according to Wan, doesn’t just punish people for being evil — he forces people who take their life for granted to appreciate what it means to be alive. And nothing, apparently, makes you appreciate being alive more than almost being murdered by a reverse bear trap.
James Wan wants to bring Jigsaw back to basics.
But while Wan’s looking to bring the franchise back to its roots, he hasn’t forgotten about the fanbase the movies have amassed over 22 years. “I want to honor what people have come to love about the franchise, whilst trying to do something fresh and new that we haven’t seen before,” he said. “This next movie would be the eleventh installment, and there have been lots of films in this world. We need to do something different in order to reach out to a new generation that didn’t grow up with it.”
Distilling the franchise down to its core ethos while also evolving the story, all while reaching both new audiences and satisfying old fans, is a big ask for a series that’s mostly about brutal murders. Still, Wan appears to have a direction in mind, and that’s as good a start as any.
