Robert Tapert Says ‘Evil Dead Wrath’ May Be the Franchise’s Toughest Battle With the MPA

The Evil Dead franchise has never been shy about testing the limits of an R rating, but producer Robert Tapert is already warning that Evil Dead Wrath may push things further than usual.

Speaking this past April at Michigan State University, Tapert revealed that Francis Galluppi’s upcoming Evil Dead Wrath takes place in 1972 and will have a very different energy than this summer’s Evil Dead Burn. More importantly, he suggested the movie may be a nightmare for the ratings board.

“That one, unlike Burn, has a lot of coming-of-age sexual hijinks in it, which the Evil Dead universe is not really known for, but this one does. And it goes there… I think – it’s going to be the one since the first Evil Dead movie that may have the most difficulty with the MPAA.”

Sam Raimi’s original The Evil Dead (1981) was the franchise’s true outlaw entry, a grimy, low-budget nightmare that was treated as dangerous in a way the later films were not. Since then, the series has lived largely inside the R-rated sandbox, from Evil Dead II to Army of Darkness, Fede Alvarez’s Evil Dead (2013), and Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise.

Even Evil Dead Burn had to be adjusted to land its R rating. Director Sébastien Vaniček recently said one scene was too much for the theatrical cut, explaining, “There is a scene that is not R-rated,” and adding, “It’s a really, really hard scene. And I have to cut it, unfortunately, so you just won’t experience it as brutally as it is right now because I need to have the R-rated movie.”