America's murderers to celebrate another Purge in 2020

By Sam Barsanti | May 13, 2019 | 9:28pm

Aux Features Film

America's murderers to celebrate another Purge in 2020

Photo: Universal

Some sad news for fans of the annual 12-hour period where all crime is legal in the United States: There won’t be a Purge this year. Also, there won’t be a Purge movie this year. Instead, we’ll have to wait until next summer for both, with Variety reporting that Universal has scheduled a fifth Purge movie for July 10, 2020. Fittingly, given the series’ weird commentary on American culture, 2020 also happens to be an election year, so perhaps it’ll follow the lead of 2016's The Purge: Election Year and make that even more overt than ever before.

On that note, we don’t know anything about Purge 5, like who will direct it or what it’ll be about (beyond the basic “all crime is legal for 12 hours” premise). The last movie was 2018's The First Purge, which told the origin of the whole Purge concept, and since then there’s been the Purge TV show. That’s a lot of legalized crime, so hopefully Universal can come up with an interesting reason to justify going back to the well.