Katie Holmes Plots Horror Comeback in ‘The Boy 2,’ Her First High-Profile Lead Role in Nearly a Decade
Katie Holmes is returning to her horror roots. After spending recent (read: post-“Jack and Jill”) years working firmly in smaller-scale cinema, including supporting roles in films like “Logan Lucky” and “Woman in Gold” and directing and starring in her feature filmmaking debut “All We Had,” Holmes has signed on for a new high-profile gig. The actress and filmmaker will star in STX Entertainment and Lakeshore Entertainment’s just-announced sequel, “The Boy 2,” which follows their 2016 horror hit “The Boy.”
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Per the film’s official logline, the film follows a “young family” who, “unaware of the terrifying history of Heelshire Mansion … moves into the estate, where their young son soon makes an unsettling new friend, an eerily life-like doll he calls Brahms.” Holmes will lead the cast in the role of “Liza,” most likely the matriarch of a seemingly doomed family.
“The Boy 2” will reunite the first film’s director William Brent Bell and screenwriter Stacey Menear, who are both set to return. Brent Bell’s “The Boy” opened in January of 2016 and handily made back its money, costing just $15 million and earning over $68 million in global returns. That film starred “Walking Dead” star Lauren Cohan as an American nanny who is hired to care for a strange charge: a life-sized doll that is treated as an actual child. (Remember this trailer? It’s one of the better horror offerings in recent memory.)
While Holmes’ breakout role was in television hit “Dawson’s Creek,” some of her earliest film roles were in horror films, including “Disturbing Behavior,” “Teaching Mrs. Tingle,” and “The Gift.” She last dabbled in the genre with Troy Nixey’s 2010 chiller “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark,” though her underseen 2014 thriller “Miss Meadows” included some genre stamps.
The film will start shooting in British Columbia in January.
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