Frank Grillo is set to return in the planned, sixth film in The Purge franchise — but there’s a catch: it will be his final time playing Leo Barnes and his exit from the blockbuster horror series. The character first appeared in The Purge: Anarchy, and then popped up again in The Purge: Election Year. He was absent from The First Purge, The Forever Purge, and the cable series The Purge, but as a major player in two films remains one of the most significant characters in the franchise. It isn’t clear whether this script is actively moving forward, though; while Grillo and director James DeMonaco have talked about this script in the past, executive producer Jason Blum has been reluctant to make promises.
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In October 2021, Blum said that the movie had not yet been greenlit, but stopped short of saying he was not planning on making the script. Whether these latest comments indicate any real forward movement or not isn’t clear.
“I had an idea in my head about how I should look, and how I’m gonna hold my guns,” Grillo told Empire magazine (via ScreenRant). “All that stuff I planned out. That solidified me as a guy who could carry a mid-level action movie. And the director, James DeMonaco, changed my life. [I’ve] got one more left. James has the script. It focuses on the Leo Barnes character, and he wants to direct it. We’re working with Universal to see if we can pull this off before I’m in the old folks’ home.”
Barnes was introduced as a police officer whose son was killed by a drunk driver, and who was seeking revenge. Since the driver was acquitted because Barnes’s son was hit by the car on the night before the Purge and died during it, Barnes figured using the Purge as his time to take revenge made sense. This sends him on a wild road trip that ends with him instead offering forgiveness to the man who killed his son, and saving the lives of a pair of girls he meets along the way.
Seventeen years later, Barnes found himself head of security for a Presidential candidate who promised to end the Purge if she won. Pro-Purge supporters spent a whole movie trying to kill her, with Leo taking them all out and the candidate winning the election. Since then, the franchise has faced the challenge of, how do you continue with the premise of the Purge without completely devaluing the events of Election Year?
“I can’t say much, but you’re definitely … You have the right reference that you’re going to,” DeMonaco told ComicBook.com when noting how The Forever Purge sets up a situation similar to Escape from New York. “It’s definitely, I’ll say this: the America that we enter into in Purge 6 is not the America we now live in. It’s been remapped, I should say, in a unique way. And we’re entering into this very changed surface of America. And the other thing I can say, because I think it’s already out there, is that, if it happens, it is the return of Frank Grillo’s Leo character, so that’s fun. But it’s definitely … A new America has been formed. And after, it’s about 10 to 15 years after The Forever Purge.”
