Oz Perkins has always been horror royalty — after all, he’s the son of Anthony Perkins, aka Norman Bates from Psycho. But in 2024, he secured himself as one of the biggest players in horror today with Longlegs, a chilling tale of ritualistic murder and Occult connections. It was an especially outstanding performance for Nicolas Cage, who combined his unique performance style with a face full of pale prosthetics.
Since then, Perkins has churned out two different horror movies, The Monkey and Keeper, within the same year — all for the indie distributor NEON, which helped turn his movies into sleeper hits. Now he’s returning to the world of Longlegs, but not with a sequel, and not with the studio that had been his home for the past few years.
Oz Perkins and Nicolas Cage will reunite not on a Longlegs sequel, but on a “movie set within the Longlegs universe.”
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Oz Perkins and Nicolas Cage are reuniting on a new Longlegs movie, but instead of being distributed by NEON like the first film, this one will be handled by Paramount. Perkins will, once again, write, direct and produce, while Cage will produce and star.
However, just because Cage will star in this upcoming movie, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll be a sequel. In fact, considering the fact that Dale Cobble, aka Longlegs, fatally bashes his head against a table in the movie itself. Instead, this movie will be “set in the Longlegs universe,” meaning it could be anything from a prequel to a spinoff.
With Longlegs’ occult subject matter, there are lots of directions a second movie could explore.
Knowing this story, perhaps the most interesting choice is for Cage to play a different character entirely — since he was unrecognizable in Longlegs, any resemblance won’t be an issue. It wouldn’t be the first time a modern horror franchise decided to do an unrelated spinoff. The M3GAN universe was set to expand with an erotic thriller called Soulm8te, but after M3GAN 2.0 underperformed, Soulm8te was taken off the release schedule.
Perhaps by skipping over the sequel entirely, Longlegs can avoid this mistake and stick to a semi-anthological format. While it does seem a shame to continue this “cinematic universe” without Maika Monroe’s FBI Agent Lee Harker, it’s undeniable that Cage’s pale-faced villain was the breakout character of the film. This could even be the start of the next big horror franchise, a series of creepy horror mysteries with one big throughline: Nicolas Cage playing a weird-looking guy, exactly the kind of character he does best. With Oz Perkins, his style of storytelling, and his prolific 2025, this could be the start of a beautiful friendship.
