Yes, you should look worried, bloody Texas-based lady, because there's a big 'ole hoedown taking place over the next in the **Texas Chainsaw **franchise. Despite being one-star terrible, the latest splat-acular, Texas Chainsaw 3D, delivered a whopping $21.7m opening weekend and soared past heavyweight contenders **Les ****Misérables **and Django Unchained. Millennium Films' Avi Lerner has since claimed that number eight is already underway and will shoot in Louisiana later this year.
'Oh. No. It. Isn't!', retort the folk at Main Line Pictures in their best panto voices."The rights are controlled by Carl (Mazzocone) and Main Line Pictures, no matter what Millennium says,” Main Line's Mark Burg told Deadline Hollywood. “Millennium simply sold the foreign rights and they will not tell us when a sequel is ready to be made. The script was developed by Carl, myself and (writer/director) John Luessenhop."
A Millennium exec has subsequently issued a statement: “I understand all this wrestling about credit, but you show me a producer who’ll turn down the cash they need to do a sequel, and I will fall off my chair. Without us, that movie would not have gotten made.”
As Deadline points out, this is hardly an unusual arm-wrestle for credit in a successful Hollywood franchise. One thing is for sure, though: no-one will want to sit on a lucrative franchise for long, so expect this rights row to be detangled and Leatherface to be refuelling his buzzsaw in the near future.