The future of Sinister may lie with Insidious.

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At least, that’s according to studio head Jason Blum, who revealed earlier this week that the mooted crossover may still come to fruition in the not-so-distant future. It’s by no means a sure thing, of course, as the Powers That Be will have to reunite many of the creative players from each respective franchise – for the record, Insidious is about to unlock The Last Key, while Sinister has quietly retreated to the shadows.

Despite gaining a fair amount of traction within horror circles, that rumored third instalment has ostensibly been shelved. Why, you ask? A good question that Screen Geek attempts to answer in its latest report, beginning with this quote from Scott Derrickson (Doctor Strange) from 2016:

Sure, yeah, I’d like there to be ten of them, but it really depends on how this turns out and how it does. The reason the script took so long was because both [co-screenwriter C.Robert] Cargill and I have seen so many horror franchises – you know, we’re really familiar with how they tend to work and what the bad tendencies are. And so we were both really committed to writing the kind of horror sequel we would like to see, and that proved to be a lot more difficult than I think either of us were expecting.

Blum, meanwhile, has been quoted as saying that the decision to retire Sinister – for now, at least – can be attributed to money, as the widely derided Sinister 2 failed to light up the box office in the way Blumhouse Productions would have hoped:

There is no ‘Sinister 3.’ We didn’t do well enough with ‘Sinister 2.’ Not enough people went to see ‘Sinister 2’ to make ‘Sinister 3,’ which is really sad. One of things that I get asked a lot is: ‘What are your professional regrets?’ Obviously, I have a lot of regrets professionally. Every movie we make, some of them are great, some of them are less great, of course. Sometimes the movies work because of the movies, sometimes it’s the marketing; it’s a complicated thing.

Sinister 3 is a pipe dream, then, so perhaps Blumhouse will choose to splice its DNA with that of Insidious in order to create Hollywood’s most horrifying crossover? We live in hope.