The alligators are trading a Florida crawlspace for the streets and sewers of New York City, and they have a date: July 16, 2027. Paramount set the Crawl sequel for that day, with Alexandre Aja returning to direct.
Mason Gooding and Emily Rudd star. The date landed Friday as part of a two-title Paramount announcement that also moved Heart Eyes 2 up a week, to February 4, 2028. The Hollywood Reporter broke the casting news back in August, when the sequel was already shooting.
What Aja Is Building This Time
Aja co-wrote the script with Jason Harry Pagan, Andrew Deutschman and his longtime collaborator Gregory Levasseur. Sam Raimi produces alongside Craig Flores and Aja, with Levasseur and Zainab Azizi executive producing. Cameras started rolling in Hungary in late August.
The premise, as the trades have described it, puts gators in the streets and sewers of New York after a hurricane hits the city. Fangoria and ComingSoon have both reported a further wrinkle: the animals get loose when the storm breaks open the Central Park Zoo, which makes the threat broader than alligators alone. Fangoria also placed the shoot in Budapest with additional work at City Media Park in Belgrade.
This is the part worth watching. Crawl worked because it was small: one house, one flooded crawlspace, two people and a wristwatch’s worth of running room. Aja has made the crowded version of this movie before, in Piranha 3D, where the horror came from a beach full of bodies rather than from a confined space closing in. A city is the second design, not the first. Whether the sequel finds a new crawlspace inside all that room is the whole question.
Where You Know the Leads From
Gooding played Chad Meeks-Martin across Scream (2022) and Scream VI, which makes him one of the few actors currently working who has survived a modern slasher franchise on purpose.
Rudd starred in Netflix’s One Piece and appeared in Fear Street Part Two: 1978, so she has already spent a summer being chased through water.
Kaya Scodelario, who carried the original almost single-handedly, ruled herself out a year before any of this was dated. Speaking to The Playlist in September 2025, she called Crawl “the most fun, challenging thing I’ve ever done” and then shut the door on a return: “But no, not a real one, I’m afraid.” Barry Pepper, who played her father, has not been announced either.
Why Paramount Went Back
Crawl opened in July 2019 and took roughly $91 million worldwide on a budget well under $20 million, with an 84 percent Rotten Tomatoes score to go with it. Raimi produced that one too. It is the rare creature feature that reviewers and audiences agreed on, and it has spent seven years as the film people name when they argue that reptile horror is not automatically disposable.
The Crawl sequel opens July 16, 2027.
