Final Destination directors bring Freaks sequel home to Vancouver
Paramount Pictures has picked up Freaks Part II, and its directors carried it back to Vancouver for a Saturday night screening at the Rio Theatre.
Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein directed the 2018 dark sci-fi thriller Freaks, and have now directed its follow-up, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The Vancouver screening was a homecoming. Lipovsky grew up in the city and made the first Freaks film there.
The original film starred Emile Hirsch and Bruce Dern. Lexy Kolker played 7-year-old Chloe, a girl kept locked inside a suburban home by her father, played by Hirsch.
Stein and Lipovsky developed Freaks over several years while working as directors on Disney television shows, as detailed by The Hollywood Reporter. It became their first feature film as directors. Crews later gave the pair a joint nickname: “Zadam”, as reported by The Hollywood Reporter.
The sequel is titled Freaks Part II, according to Bloody Disgusting. It is set several years after the events of the 2018 film, according to VIFF. In the new story, Amanda Crew plays a mother and Lorelei Olivia Mote plays her daughter.
Lipovsky and Stein first met as rival competitors on On the Lot, the Fox film-making competition series from Steven Spielberg and Mark Burnett. That contest put young directors through weekly short films and audience votes. The pair have worked together since.
Their path since Freaks has run through large studio productions. They directed Final Destination Bloodlines, the sixth entry in the Final Destination franchise. They now have a first-look deal at Sony Pictures, an agreement that gives the studio first chance to take on ideas they develop, and work from the Sony lot in Culver City, California.
Their current slate spans several studios. They are working for Sony on an animated Venom film and on Metal Gear Solid. They are also working on an adaptation of the Long Lost short story for Amblin and Universal, and are writers on Chris Columbus’s Gremlins 3.
For fans, this means a rare full circle. A small Vancouver production grew into studio work, then returned to the same city with its sequel in tow.
