Saw X saved the billions series after 2 failed attempts

In 2004, no one could have imagined that James Wan’s low-budget shocker Saw would start a franchise that would already include 10 films almost 20 years later. Today, the horror series shows hardly any signs of fatigue: Saw X has already grossed over $100 million at the box office, bringing the saga over the billion mark.

Only German fans of John Kramer’s torture games had to show patience, which has now come to an end. From November 30th and with that Two months after its US release, Saw X is finally showing in cinemas in Germany.

Saw X: That’s what the best sequel in the horror series is about

With Saw X, the horror franchise breaks new ground. Instead of continuing the continuity of the last films, Part 10 jumps back many years. The plot takes place after the very first film and before its sequel, Saw II. Without the story ballast of numerous sequels and the winding mythology, Saw X focuses entirely on The strength of the series: John Kramer (Tobin Bell).

For the first time, the Jigsaw killer John Kramer is the main character (and anti-hero) at the center of a Saw film. At the beginning he ends up in Mexico, where an experimental and expensive therapy promises hope for his incurable cancer. Unfortunately, he is caught in a perfidious scam.

Watch the German trailer for Saw X here:

Unfortunately, the fraudsters around the “doctor” Cecilia Pederson (Synnøve Macody Lund, known from the Netflix series Ragnarök) have messed with the wrong person. Supported by his assistant Amanda (Shawnee Smith), Jigsaw kidnaps the charlatans to a remote warehouse and uses perfidious trap games to show them their wrongdoing.

Regardless of whether it’s self-amputation, self-mutilation or surgery on one’s own brain: the traps in Saw X are usually explicit, bloody and extremely painful to watch. But the big surprise of the film is… the unexpectedly emotional character momentswhich shape Tobin Bell’s Jigsaw Killer into a complex antihero and cement his status as an icon of the horror genre.

The Saw series was in crisis and Part 10 saved it

The success story of the Saw series has been marked by some setbacks in recent years. After the original conclusion with Saw VII – completion, a soft reboot took place after a seven-year break, which established a new Jigsaw successor.

Jigsaw was supposed to start a new series, but this project can be considered a failure. The film managed to gross over $100 million, but was received less enthusiastically by fans. The next reboot attempt followed in 2021 in the form of the spin-off Saw: Spiral, which dispensed with well-known characters and only grossed $40 million biggest flop of the series became.

Saw X is now the third attempt to revive the series. But this time the calculation worked out. The nostalgia approach and heavy focus on John Kramer, who was killed in Saw III, seems to be exactly what fans really want to see in a Saw movie.

On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, Saw named the best film in the entire series. Part 10 also performs better on Metacritic with a score of 60 than all previous torture chapters. On IMDB, the film also surpassed all sequels with a rating of 6.7, only the original is rated higher.

The surprisingly positive reactions and the box office performance prove that the series is far from dead and can continue to attract horror fans to the cinemas even after almost 20 years. An 11th Saw film hasn’t been officially announced yet, but after the success of Saw X, it’s only a matter of time.

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