Adam Wingard's Onslaught Brings Dan Stevens Back to The Guest Universe
Adam Wingard's action thriller Onslaught arrives in cinemas on 4 September 2026, reuniting the director with Dan Stevens twelve years after their 2014 film The Guest became a cult favourite (FANGORIA, via Facebook). The film is produced by A24, Lyrical Media, and Ryder, with Adria Arjona in the top-line role and Rebecca Hall among the cast (The Hollywood Reporter). Stevens has described Onslaught as a spiritual sequel to The Guest rather than a direct continuation (IMDb News), while Hall has said she does not consider the film a sequel at all (JoBlo).
The distinction matters because there was once a very different plan. The Guest ends with Stevens' character David Collins — an unhinged super-soldier operating under a stolen identity — limping away from a killing spree in Moriarty, New Mexico, wearing a firefighter's disguise. The real soldier behind that identity had suffered a spinal injury in combat before volunteering for a medical experiment called Project Aegolius, designed to shut off his pain receptors and give him conscious control over his adrenaline (The Hollywood Reporter).
One of David Collins' victims in The Guest was Major Richard Carver, played by Lance Reddick — a military liaison to the defence contractor KPG. By late 2022, while Wingard was finishing post-production on Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, he and his writing partner Simon Barrett were building momentum for a direct The Guest sequel that would have brought Carver back. The April Fool's Day 2022 release of a soundtrack for The Guest 2 — a film that did not exist — had been the first public tease. Its cover art depicted four surviving characters, including a mysterious silhouette in a wheelchair, hinting at Carver's return (The Hollywood Reporter).
Then Lance Reddick passed away in March 2023. Wingard has said the death slowed the sequel's development because every idea they had formulated up to that point included bringing Carver back (The Hollywood Reporter). The project eventually evolved into Onslaught, which expands the contained thriller premise of The Guest into a story about an arms race run rampant (The A.V. Club).
Wingard's path back to this material runs through a stretch of studio franchise work. After The Guest, he directed Blair Witch, Death Note, Godzilla vs. Kong, and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. He also developed a Face/Off sequel, a ThunderCats movie, and several other studio projects that did not reach production (The Hollywood Reporter). In an interview published 2 September 2026 by The Playlist, Wingard discussed the abandoned Face/Off sequel and the influences shaping Onslaught (The Playlist).
For audiences who found The Guest in the years after its underwhelming theatrical run, Onslaught offers something familiar in spirit — a super-soldier story rooted in the same DNA, scaled up to a wider canvas. Whether it functions as sequel, spiritual successor, or standalone action film is a question its cast members answer differently. The film lands in cinemas first.
