Here’s Why Evil Dead 4 Never Happened, Plus New Ash Vs. Evil Dead Poster

By Danny F. Santos (doddleNEWS)

One of the best shows that premiered last season was Ash vs. Evil Dead. It not only brought Bruce Campbell back to his iconic role but it was a worthy follow up to the Evil Dead trilogy — and it was a long wait.

Before the show was announced, there had been countless rumors and announcements for a fourth film that oscillated between “Yes, it’s happening,” and “No, it’s not happening.” With the audio commentary for season one of Ash vs. Evil Dead, we finally have an answer as to why that happened. Here’s what Sam Raimi revealed on the upcoming Blu-ray release via Screen Rant:

“Ivan and I wrote a lot of different versions of Evil Dead as a feature in the years after Army of Darkness (1992). We’d get 20 pages into one draft and realize it was not good, [then] do another five pages [in] a different direction.”

So what stories were they working on? One of them was apparently a film where Ash directs a documentary of the events of his life and takes it across the country, only to find that no one cares. Raimi describes it as:

“Bruce is a documentary filmmaker, I remember one of them was, capturing his own journey through life. I remember we wrote one version; we started to write one version of Evil Dead 4… “

Co-writer Ivan Raimi continues:

“Bruce travels cross-country to sell his documentary in a car to explain the importance of his story being told.”

Another concept had Ash take on sentient evil robots called Ash vs. The Machines in a very Terminator-like story. Sam Raimi says the idea was scrapped because there “wouldn’t be enough money for the big production we had planned.”

While those ideas sound strange, one of the weirder ideas was to make sense of the theatrical and director cuts of Army of Darkness. The original ending for the film had Ash wake up in a dystopian future, but the studio asked for a new ending to be shot where he ended up happily ever after at S-Mart. That led to the following idea, which Sam Raimi explains:

“So we wrote an Evil Dead 4 that followed both realities. We were going to be following two Bruces – one in the future and simultaneously crosscutting to Bruce here in the present. And we realized, we have really lost our mind now and we must stop.”

That sounds needlessly complex and all of those ideas seem fairly outlandish for a sequel, so I’m even more grateful with what we finally ended up with. As a little bonus, Starz has also released a new poster for the upcoming season 2 of Ash Vs. Evil Dead.

Ash vs. Evil Dead season 2 will premiere on October 2, 2016 on Starz.