MaXXXine Might Not Be the End of A24's X Franchise
Ti West’s innovative series could soldier on without its star.
Ti West’s collaboration with Mia Goth continues to bear fruit. After delivering back-to-back slashers with X and Pearl, the director and actress are teaming up for yet another thriller. This year’s MaXXXine will bring the X saga to the ‘80s; just as X itself spliced the gore of Texas Chainsaw Massacre with the pulp of ‘70s adult film, its sequel will bring neon-drenched paranoia back to the noir.
MaXXXine takes place roughly six years after X and follows Goth’s final girl, Maxine Minx, as she tries to break into Hollywood. Since we last saw her, Maxine has peaked in Hollywood’s adult film industry and is looking to make “real movies,” starting with a studio horror: The Puritan II.
The scale of Maxine’s big break mirrors the expanded scope of West’s franchise. “X was a lot about the absurdity of making a movie,” the director recently told Entertainment Weekly. With Maxine closer to her dream than ever, West’s latest film is “substantially bigger” than X and Pearl. Ideally, MaXXXine will also cap this trilogy off on a high note... but will this be the last we see of West’s innovative slasher universe?
MaXXXine will end West’s X trilogy, but the filmmaker may have ideas for extending it.
Per West, MaXXXine represents the closing of a chapter. The film “will probably be the end of the Maxine era,” which means his partnership with Goth could also end. It’s natural that West would eventually explore other projects, but he’s not completely giving up on the X universe just yet.
After MaXXXine hits theaters this year, West suggests he’ll take a break to “figure out what’s next.” After working nonstop on this trilogy, which included shooting X and Pearl back-to-back, the filmmaker seems ready to take a step back, if only to find a new way forward.
“I do have one idea that plays into these movies that could maybe happen,” he told EW. “I don’t know if it’ll be next. It might be. We’ll see.
“If there’s more to be done in this franchise, it’s certainly not what people are expecting it to be. It’s not just picking up again a few years later and whatever,” West continued, citing the connective tissue between X and MaXXXine. The filmmaker’s latest idea is “different in the way that Pearl was an unexpected departure.”
If Ti West does continue with an X-related film, it will be “another unexpected departure.”
Pearl is set in the same continuity as X and MaXXXine, but it turns the clock back to the 1920s and follows the main antagonist of X (also played by Goth) as an aspiring starlet. The 2022 film was West’s opportunity to pay tribute to early Hollywood films like The Wizard of Oz, and it sounds like West still wants to explore other eras. Without Maxine (or Pearl, for that matter), West’s next idea could push the X franchise into new territory.
If done right, X could become the equivalent of Netflix’s Fear Street saga — or in a looser sense, FX’s American Horror Story anthology. Time will tell, but A24’s unlikely horror franchise could sire an entire universe.
