Clutch these fun facts to your chest and hope the nightmares subside!
By Eric Ditzian
"Paranormal Activity 2"
Photo: Paramount Pictures
"Paranormal Activity 2" is the story of what happens when a horror movie that cost about as much as a brand-new Ford Fiesta makes almost $200 million at the worldwide box office.
How are you not going to make a sequel to a movie that has become the most profitable flick in Hollywood history? Giving "PA 2" a green-light was a no-brainer for Paramount. What was considerably trickier was making a movie that would please all the fans who embraced the original film last year. Crazy thing is, the studio seems to have pulled it off, as early reviews have been extremely positive. The sequel, in short, is scary as hell.
So think of MTV News' "Paranormal Activity" cheat sheet as a safety blanket of sorts: Clutch it to your chest and hope the nightmares subside. Alas, they probably won't for a while. Enjoy!
Activity on More 'Activity'
After a limited rollout during it's first three weekends, "PA" went wide and popped off grosses of $19.6 million, $21.1 million and $16.4 million over the following three weekends. By that point, sequel talk was already out in the open. Paramount was pressing forward and confident in its ability to come up with the right creative approach.
Writer/director Oren Peli would not be reprising his duties, so who would? Early word was that the director gig would go to Kevin Greutert ("Saw VI"), but that never came to pass. Then there was a wacky rumor that Brian De Palma would get the job. That never happened either, and the man who ended up occupying the director's chair was Tod Williams ("The Door in the Floor").
Who's Screaming Now?
As the crew came together, the question remained: Would Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat reprise their roles? And given how "PA" ended, could they reprise their roles?
Sloat hinted he would when we caught up with him in March. "All I can tell you is I'm very excited for the project, it's really cool, it's gonna be really interesting and it's not gonna suck," he said.
Featherston, by contrast, was totally in the dark. "I don't know. I'm waiting to hear," the actress told us in March. "If they had a way to put me in there in a way that would be reasonable and make sense — I don't know how they'd do that — I'd definitely be down for it. If I get that phone call, I will be there. I will be scared or happy or whatever they want me to be."
Did they eventually make the cut? Who else did? That's entering spoiler territory, so we'll leave it there and just say, "See the freaking movie!"
Time to Freak Out
In June, the trailer arrived. It, too, avoided spoilers — and got us very pumped about the sequel. A second, more revealing trailer popped up in September. A slew of viral videos and a clip soon followed.
Finally, it came time for fans to see the movie. Paramount staged 19 midnight screenings across the country, and we were there in New York and Los Angeles to take in the terror.
"I'm scared," one L.A. fan told us after the movie. "We're not going to sleep. Drink coffee, stay up tonight, watch some cartoons, but we're not going to sleep."
Check out everything we've got on "Paranormal Activity 2."
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