The Purge TV show is no more, but Blumhouse isn’t backing down from its foray into the small screen just yet. As reported by Deadline, the studio is moving forward with a TV show sequel to Upgrade, Leigh Whennell’s body horror/action movie from 2018 about a guy who gets a cybernetic implant in his brain called STEM that makes him a super-powered killing machine (and gives him a buddy to chat with when he’s not killing). Purge TV veterans Krystal Ziv Houghton and James Roland are among the writers, along with Whannell and Treadstone’s Tim Walsh (who is also serving as showrunner). Working on the Bourne spin-off gives Walsh some surprisingly appropriate experience here, since Treadstone was also about people who have been programmed to kill (but with less of a cyberpunk hook than Upgrade).
It doesn’t sound like the Upgrade show will directly follow along from the plot of the movie, jumping instead to a few years after Logan Marshall-Green’s Grey Trace killed all of those people and focusing on a new version of STEM that is being used by the government to suppress criminal activity. At the risk of sounding reductive, it’s kind of like Blumhouse literally combined The Purge and Treadstone and Upgrade here, but maybe Whannell came up with the idea first and then happened to find the perfect people to make it? We don’t know.