[Editor's note: The following contains spoilers for the Escape Room: Tournament of Champions.]Adam Robitel and his Escape Room team started crafting a fascinating evil organization in the 2019 film. Minos targeted specific individuals to throw into their highly elaborate life or death escape rooms so that wealthy spectators could watch and bet on the players’ survival chances. Sounds straightforward enough, right? Yes, but if you really think about it, the questions regarding the behind-the-scenes of an operation like that are endless.
How do they build these rooms in secrecy? Who exactly is designing them? What’s the endgame? Escape Room: Tournament of Champions does answer some of those burning questions, but it raises some new ones in the process.
With the sequel now available to watch in theaters, I got the chance to chat with Robitel about his experience developing the new movie. We already ran the spoiler-free half of our conversation, but now it’s time to dig into those spoiler-heavy details, beginning with the plane of it all. If Zoey (Taylor Russell) had gotten on that plane as originally planned and didn’t drive to New York, would the tournament of champions never have happened? Here’s Robitel’s take on that one:
“I always say that Minos, they run contingencies. I think ultimately the plane is the plane is the plane and that was their long game. It’s like a prize fight. It’s like Logan Paul getting into the ring, right? It’s like, if they can make a buck and if they can turn a profit, and so I think they’ve got plenty of people behind the scenes pulling the strings.”
Robitel continued by explaining that it’s not just about the kill for Minos. Entertainment value can come in other forms:
“The idea itself that they can punk her and make her think that she brought them down, that alone I think is the more entertainment value than just killing her on a plane, you know what I mean? The mind-trickery of that and the manipulation of that is the ultimate punk. So that’s where I go with that. I totally understand that you might be like, ‘Wait, wait, wait, wait. The canon and what? And wait. Debra’s dead. We saw her …’ So, we definitely took some poetic licenses but I think in a world where Minos is theatrical and they do use smokescreens and we did show an ice wall that then changed and it was fake, so I think the part of the carnival of them, you kind of buy it.”
As for assembling the pieces of that carnival, Robitel explained that they did consider the logistics of what it might take to pull something like that off:
“Even showing in the end that we get a great look behind the curtain of these giant modular pieces. Because we did a lot of intellectual conversations about, how would they do this? Are they sending pieces of death rooms in Amazon trucks? Is Jeff Bezos the puzzle maker, you know what I mean? Because it would take so much logistical challenge in terms of getting in and out like this murderous band of circus people.”
I don’t know about you, but I’d certainly watch another Escape Room movie told from the perspective of an unwitting Minos employee and it turns out, Robitel actually pitched the idea:
“I pitched a version of people working unwittingly, like WeWorks and they’re working on the death rooms, but they don’t know it. You know what I mean? It’s like, ‘Hey, why do I need this squib? And where’s this sand going?’ And they go up to the 10th floor and they see the designs and they’re like, ‘Hey John, do you know that we’re killing people?’ That would be like movie eight where it goes into comedy horror.”
Robitel also shared another Escape Room story possibility with loads of potential:
“The other one I love is, what if you had a viewing party? You had a bunch of rich assholes watching the game and then they get thrown into the game. You want to see them because they’re really the problem, [it’s] this audience, the rubberneckers who actually want to watch this entertainment. They’re the real problem, right?”
We’ll have to wait and see if the studio gives another Escape Room movie a green light, but it’s abundantly clear that Robitel’s got a slew of worthwhile ideas. While we wait for an official update on the franchise, be sure to catch our full spoiler conversation at the top of this article, which also includes how Robitel approached bringing Deborah Ann Woll’s Amanda back into the fold.