Eli Roth provides exciting Thanksgiving sequel update: 'We're upping the ante'

Christmas is on our doorstep, but some of us are still looking back fondly on the 2023 slasher flick Thanksgiving, a darkly comic slasher film centering on the slasher figure John Carver. Now that it has been one year since the movie was released, we can safely say that Thanksgiving might just become a new tradition for horror fans eager to watch something bloody on their annual Turkey Day.

Because the first movie did well theatrically and critically, Sony greenlit a sequel and Thanksgiving 2 is on track for a late 2025 release. Director Eli Roth recently sat down with IndieWire to provide us all with a much-needed update for the sequel (and he does say it will be a sequel, not a prequel).

That makes sense because, as we previously reported, Roth already teased the return of Addison Rae's character, Gaby, one of the few survivors of the first film. Other actors like Nell Verlaque (Jessica) and Rick Hoffman (Thomas Wright) have also hinted at their return for the sequel, which Roth says will go into production by late March 2025.

As for what we can expect from the next movie, the Hostel filmmaker says they want to keep the budget low, that's what helped allow Thanksgiving to be profitable in 2023. But Roth has a good creative reason for that, too. He believes the smaller budget allows them to keep the story "tight and lean and mean and forces us to make decisions."

While Roth says they will definitely be "upping the ante," it sounds like that's going to come more from moments of pay-off that were already established in the first movie. Now that they've already established John Carver, his identity, and his gory methods of killing, the sequel can pick up where they left off and run with it.

Spoiler for the 2023 movie, but it ends with Jessica escaping from the killer, who is then believed to have died in a fiery explosion, though the police never find his body, hinting that he could still be very much alive and will probably return to finish what he started.

While chatting with IndieWire, the director said he wanted the sequel to have a tense "cat-and-mouse chase," shouting out the 1995 movie Mute Witness as inspiration and even the scene where Carver chases Kathleen with a pitchfork in the 2023 movie.

Based on that comment, I think we can safely assume that Carver will return in some capacity. But will he be the same person as he was in the first movie? Or will someone new don the mask, à la Ghostface?