Seven at 30: Discover the Star-Studded Movie That Nearly Followed the Iconic Thriller
It’s now been three decades to the day since David Fincher’s Seven was first released. Despite New Line Cinema’s initial misgivings about its relentlessly dark tone and aesthetic, it quickly became one of 1995’s biggest box-office successes, also earning favorable reviews and becoming an icon of ’90s neo-noir crime films. It’s a great standalone film, but after such a rousing success, it’s hard not to wonder why the studio never called for a sequel to Seven. The answer is that they did call for one, and while the Seven follow-up project never came to fruition, the movie itself did.
A Brief Recap of Seven (Spoilers Included)
Seven is a rare crime movie with a story that feels at once gritty and larger-than-life. Morgan Freeman plays William Somerset, a cynical and coolly logical old detective who is partnered with Brad Pitt’s quixotic, emotionalistic young David Mills to find a serial killer who is engaged in a killing spree: one victim for each of the Seven Deadly Sins. Each murder (presented with the kind of discretion that is somehow more stomach-churning than graphic gore would be) is almost surreally grisly: an alleged glutton forced to eat until his stomach ruptures, a model disfigured so grotesquely that her pride prompts her to commit suicide, and so on.
The twist is that the killer, John Doe (Kevin Spacey), turns himself in just before the third act kicks off. He’s only committed five of his seven planned murders, and he’s decided to manipulate the two detectives into becoming pieces in his grand finale. After revealing that he’s murdered David’s pregnant wife, whom he coveted, David loses his temper and embodies wrath by shooting John Doe dead.
The Spec Script Proposed as Sequel
How can one possibly go about following up that conclusion? In 2002, New Line hit upon an idea. In the late 1990s, screenwriter Ted Griffin (Ocean’s Eleven) and future Disney head producer Sean Bailey wrote a script that New Line picked up in 2001. This script (on which, Griffin admitted in a 2021 interview with Bloody Disgusting, Seven was a “conspicuous influence”) concerned a detective who has psychic powers and uses them in his hunt for a serial killer.
In their quest for a sequel to Seven, New Line proposed that Griffin and Bailey’s script be converted into a sequel to Seven. They elected to call this sequel Eight (or rather Ei8ht, in line with the common stylization of Seven as Se7en), though it’s not clear what element of the movie itself would have justified this mathematically amusing title. The plan was for Morgan Freeman to reprise his role; the wise, experienced William Somerset might have become clairvoyant as well.
Of course, this idea never came to pass, and it doesn’t appear that it was under professional consideration for very long. Griffin recounted that he and Bailey only met with New Line once; in this meeting, they considered how they might propose the sequel to Freeman, but they never actually entered into this next stage of the project.
Solace: An Original Serial-Killer Thriller with Star Power
However, the script itself ultimately made it to the screen. Directed by Afonso Poyart and distributed by Lionsgate, the movie was titled Solace and released in September of 2015 at the Toronto International Film Festival. It received a limited release in December of the following year. The role of the clairvoyant detective went not to Morgan Freeman, but to another icon of ’90s serial-killer flicks: Anthony Hopkins. Colin Farrell played the movie’s serial killer, who has psychic powers of his own and murders terminally ill people as a form of euthanasia.
This combination of innovative premise and stellar cast members may sound like a recipe for a great or at least solid serial-killer flick, but critics didn’t see Solace that way. The film had a primarily negative reception, being criticized for its hokey and derivative plot. Moreover, it never received more than a limited release before Lionsgate moved it to online streaming.
“Ei8ht” Very Unlikely, especially with Fincher’s Stance
Will a Seven sequel ever come to pass? Its prospects aren’t looking good. In April of this year, New Line’s president Richard Brener flatly told The Hollywood Reporter “No” when asked whether this sequel was on the horizon. He did insert the caveat that “if David Fincher wanted to do it, sure,” but if Fincher’s public statement on the matter is any indication, there’s practically zero chance of this possibility.
In 2009, Variety reported on a talkback for Fincher’s then-latest film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Asked about the prospect of following up Seven, the director responded: “I would be less interested in that than I would in having cigarettes put out in my eyes.” The reason behind Fincher’s vehement answer is explained by a subsequent quote from this talkback. “I keep trying to get out from under my own shadow,” he professed, “I don’t want to do the same shit over and over.”
Fincher’s body of work strongly supports this statement. His directorial debut was Alien 3, and he’s currently slated to direct a follow-up to Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but never in his career has he made a sequel to one of his own previous movies. Seven is a fine film, and some would argue that it’s worth following up, but Fincher clearly only agrees with the first part.
