Leigh Whannell, franchise veteran, thinks The Invisible Man should be left alone

Somebody like Leigh Whannell (screenwriter of Saw and Insidious) knows the power of a franchise. "Sequels are mostly driven by the economics of Hollywood. 'We scored, we did well, and let’s do it again. Let's get them back there,'" he observes in a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter. Whannell's 2019 The Invisible Man enjoyed enough critical and commercial success that sequel conversation has been going on for literal years. Yet Whannell is uninterested in pursuing it himself, and it sounds like he hopes they don't move forward with it at all. 

"I was so happy with Invisible Man’s ending that I just don’t feel the artistic need to go forward with it," he tells THR. "The financial need is something different. The studio might look at that and say, 'Well, we feel like it should keep going because we want to make more money.' But on an artistic level, I'm like, 'That's a nice closed door there. Let’s just leave it closed.'"

Mega producer Jason Blum has certainly been dreaming of more Invisible Man, and star Elisabeth Moss told the Happy Sad Confused podcast in April 2024 that Blumhouse and her production company Love & Squalor Pictures "are closer than we have ever been to cracking it, and I feel very good about it, and we are very much intent on continuing that story, for sure." Whannell, however, has been pretty adamant that he views the story as finished, despite recognizing the matter is out of his hands. 

It's an interesting stance to take on this particular property, given that the Invisible Man was intended to be part of Universal's "Dark Universe" franchise. The original concept was dropped, but Moss hinted in her Happy Sad Confused interview that the studio was still potentially interested in connecting the monster films together somewhere down the line. Whannell, who also directed this year's Wolf Man, doesn't see the films he's made that way. They're connected, but "not in a connected universe-type way where you can expect a team-up next year. Filmmakers over the course of their careers make movies that talk to each other, even indirectly," he says to THR, comparing the Invisible Man and Wolf Man's shared setting in San Francisco to Martin Scorsese's movies in New York. "There’s something that’s subconsciously linking all this stuff, but it’s not direct."

The writer-director's wariness of franchising seems to come from being a "front-row viewer." Saw and Insidious "have turned into long-running franchises with varying degrees of artistic success," he admits to THR. "I'm not going to pretend that every movie in the Saw franchise is … That film has become its own beast, and I sit outside of it now." Whannell's experience may have given him the wisdom to know when to let something end, but also the wisdom to know that Hollywood will never let a franchise die.