Escape Room 2 director on topping the first film’s deadly challenges

The director of thriller sequel Escape Room: Tournament Of Champions has admitted it was a challenge to top the first film’s deadly traps.

Escape Room arrived in 2019 inspired by the popular real-world attractions tasking players with solving puzzles against the clock in order to unlock their way out.

The film, which was a box office success, featured rooms with deathly drops, poisonous gas and a giant oven.

Tournament Of Champions subjects its victims to threats such as acid rain and an electrified train.

Director Adam Robitel said thinking up more deadly rooms was the biggest challenge of making the sequel.

He told the PA news agency: “We did a lot of the main ways to kill people in the first movie, whether it was fire or gravity or gas or cold, so coming into this movie it was like, ‘Wait, how do we kill people? What if it’s just a giant clock with knives on it?’.

“It was really hard to come up with the spaces that felt like an Escape Room movie. We’re not a traditional rated R movie, we try to make the spaces beautiful and kind of seductive.

“The train was a great image that came to me, I thought it would be really cool to derail a subway car and turn it into a giant Tesla coil. So it was just a process to come up with the spaces that were going to make sense.”

Robitel reserved special praise for Ed Thomas, the Welsh production designer responsible for making the sadistic traps reality.

The train was built from scratch, Robitel revealed, while a bank featured in Tournament Of Champions was adapted from a real building in South Africa.

The director said: “I always say it’s like a backlot stunt show – these sets are really characters and the New York City street was an old factory building that we retrofitted, we had rain towers and things melting on set.

“So you get that old-school theatrical vibe from these movies.”

Escape Room: Tournament Of Champions is released in cinemas on July 16.