Mason Gooding and Emily Rudd will lead Paramount Pictures’ untitled sequel to Crawl, with Sarah Niles, Ray Panthaki, Richard Brake, Charley Palmer Rothwell, and Flula Borg rounding out the cast, The Hollywood Reporter reports. Directed by Alexandre Aja, the film is set for theatrical release July 16, 2027.
The original Crawl, released in 2019, followed a woman and her estranged father as they became trapped in their flooding Florida home during a Category 5 hurricane, only to discover the house was already home to a growing swarm of massive alligators that had moved in with the rising water. Stripped down to essentially two characters fighting for survival in a crawl space, the film leaned into claustrophobia and real physical danger rather than conventional jump scares, earning praise for its tight pacing and grossing more than $91 million worldwide against a budget under $14 million, a strong return for a mid-budget creature feature.
The sequel shifts its setting from a single flooded house to a hurricane-flooded New York City, with production filmed in Hungary and Serbia. Aja directs from a script he co-wrote with Jason Harry Pagan, Andrew Deutschman, and Gregory Levasseur. Craig Flores, Sam Raimi, and Aja produce, with Levasseur, Kevan Van Thompson, and Zainab Azizi executive producing.
Niles has earned two Emmy nominations for her role on Apple TV’s Ted Lasso, with additional feature credits including Fantastic Four: The First Steps, Heads of State, and F1. Panthaki appeared alongside Samantha Morton and Charles Dance on Starz’s The Serpent Queen, with film roles in Boiling Point, Official Secrets, and Colette.
With a cast this stacked now in place and a hurricane-ravaged New York City replacing the original’s confined Florida setting, the next thing to watch is whether the sequel can translate the first film’s tight, claustrophobic tension into a much larger, more sprawling environment.