'Escape Room' director Adam Robitel on sequel: 'You have to raise the bar'

The 2019 surprise horror hit raked in about $155 million at the global box officer from a sub-$10m budget

'Escape Room: Tournament fo Champions' is in cinemas this week

Cast your mind back to 2019 and those heady days before the pandemic changed our lives. It was a time when eager customers would willingly pay good money to be locked in a room, and enjoy it.

It was the height of the escape room craze, where challengers are pitted against fiendish puzzles and clues to escape a locked room within a time limit. Adam Robitel's Escape Room seemingly caught the zeitgeist perfectly, raking in about $155 million at the global box office from a sub-$10m budget.

The film has unwitting contestants competing in real-life escape rooms run by the shadowy Minos corporation. In these games, however, the penalty for failure is not a mild teasing from your more puzzle-competent peers, but death.

With its 15-fold returns, a sequel was almost inevitable, but will audiences – many of whom spent the majority of last year confined to their own homes – be quite so eager to witness their predicament played out on the big screen this time around?

Robitel, who returns to direct Escape Room 2: Tournament of Champions, seems unconcerned. “I thought of that, too – we've all been locked in and we all want to get out. But what I like about the sequel is this idea that no one really has agency over their own lives and that every choice we make might be influenced by an evil organisation like Minos,” he says.

“I think coming out of a pandemic we all feel like our grasp on our livelihoods is tenuous, and there are these almost supernatural forces that can, in the drop of a dime, erode everything – all our freedoms, our way of life. I tried to lean into that with the mythology of this one where the whole world is the game in a way.”

Robitel has a point. While the first film took place largely within the claustrophobic confines of the traditional escape room setting, the sequel has entire beach scenes and cityscapes transformed into lethal traps.

The greater scope of the sequel was no doubt helped by the bigger budget that comes with a successful franchise opener. Robitel says he firmly believes that if you're going to make a sequel, it should be bigger and better than what came before.

“I always feel like for a sequel to exist, you have to kind of raise the bar, but coming up with new, visual ways was surprisingly difficult,” he reveals. “I really wanted to do lasers, but there haven't been that many best practice laser movies. We found this beautiful Art Deco bank that really gave us some scope and then we had this great laser grid, so it was just an evolution of wanting to push the boundaries and expand the mythology.”

Unfortunately for Robitel and his cast and crew, a bigger budget doesn't necessarily mean more luxury on set. He recalls shooting the film's beach scenes as a particularly tough time. “For the beach set that swallows people whole we had 20,000 tonnes of sand that we brought in from a Cape Town beach,” he recalls.

“It smelled like a dead crab fest and the special effects guys would aerate the sand and liquefy it, and our actors are starting to sink, it's kicking up sand in our faces, our corneas are getting scratched. It was super, super challenging. I don't think I'll ever forget that sound.”

With two Escape Room movies already under his belt and (predictable spoiler alert) a cliffhanger ending that leaves the door wide open to a third, it looks like Escape Room could be with us for some time to come. Robitel has already lightheartedly compared the film to the Saw franchise, which had its ninth episode land in cinemas in May, with number 10 already under way.

It comes as a surprise, then, to learn that before being approached to direct the movie, not only was Robitel not a fan of the real-world escape room craze, but he hadn't even heard of it.

“When I read the first draft, I was brought into the producers' office and I was very poker-faced. I was like, 'Oh, I guess I have to go out and do this' – I didn't know what an escape room was,” he admits. “So I went out in LA before I committed to the movie and I did 10 escape rooms over a four-day period, and I quickly became enamoured with them.

"The good ones are super art directed. You pull a valve and a light turns on and there's a map behind you that was hidden. I remember one where there was a body and a tub and you pull the drain of the water and the water drains, and the rooms change over time and by the time all the clues have exploded the whole room changes. I got really excited from a cinematic language perspective.”

Despite his love of escape rooms, however, it sounds like Robitel will be sticking to the cinematic side of things rather than launching a new career as a professional escape room challenger. “I'm not particularly good with escape rooms,” he concedes. “I'm not very logical, so I'm usually the guy in the corner sweating with hives. It's just not my skill set.”

Escape Room 2: Tournament of Champions is in UAE cinemas from Thursday, July 15