The Purge 4 gets summer 2018 release date

Universal Pictures and Blumhouse Productions will be celebrating America’s 242nd birthday with another night of mayhem. The companies announced today that the untitled fourth installment of the politically themed horror franchise The Purge will hit theaters July 4, 2018.

Franchise creator James DeMonaco will once again write the script, but this time he will hand the reins to a new director, yet to be named.

Set in a dystopian near-future where all crime is legalized for an annual 12-hour period, the previous films — 2013’s The Purge, 2014’s The Purge: Anarchy, and 2016’s The Purge: Election Year — have combined to gross nearly $320 million at the worldwide box office, on modest budgets of $10 million or less.

Plot details have yet to be revealed for the fourth Purge movie, though DeMonaco told CinemaBlend in September that the filmmakers might go the prequel route. “That seems the natural next chapter in this,” he said. “To say, all right, we’ve done this trilogy. We see how it got to this point of someone trying to end it — this presidential figure. Now let’s go back and see how the f‑‑‑ all this came about. How did this country get to a place where we were now accepting this kind of atrocity, this terrible thing, each year?”

Just in case the next Purge is looking to reflect or comment on real-world politics, it’s scheduled to arrive a few months before the 2018 midterm elections.