Escape Room: Tournament of Champions director says they already have a ‘treasure trove’ of ideas for Part 3

With ambitious set pieces and wild death traps, the 2019 thriller Escape Room proved a surprise hit — and now the sequel Escape Room: Tournament of Champions is set to send us back into the action with some even deadlier rooms on tap.

But what about after that? Turns out, there are plenty of ideas still on the dry erase board for Escape Room and Tournament of Champions director Adam Robitel. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Robitel revealed they have a lot of concepts for how to continue this story on with a third film. Like anything, it’ll all just depend on if the audience turns out and makes Part 2 a hit, as well.

“We have a treasure trove of ideas [for a third Escape Room movie]. It's really going to be up to the fans,” Robitel told EW. “But, look, there's a lot of ways to skin the cat, there's a lot of different ways to continue to play with the audience's expectations. Yeah, we'd be really excited to do that.”

The film series drops regular people into ridiculously elaborate “escape room” settings, though this time around a failure to solve the puzzle results in an untimely demise for the players. The first movie introduced the concept, while Tournament of Champions expands that idea to show this has been going on for a while — and now all the winners have to face off in the ultimate competition.

With the premise already laid out in the first movie, Robitel said it actually made the second film easier to put together because they could one-up the rooms from the first movie, and push the narrative forward while building this world. 

“For a sequel to exist, I feel you have to outdo what came before. The billiard room from the first movie is probably still my favorite, but I'm pretty pleased with the rooms that [we have in Escape Room: Tournament of Champions],” he said. "We have an acid rain room. A giant beach set that is going to try to swallow people whole. What's fun about this movie is the rooms themselves are telling a different story. In the first film, it was the characters' backstories, here they're leading towards a mystery that we're going to learn about in the third act.”

Reviews for Escape Room: Tournament of Champions have been solid, and the film opens wide in theaters on Friday, July 16.