Escape Room (2019)
- Eagle-eyed viewers have noticed a hidden easter egg referencing Adam Robitel's previous film in the background of the opening scene.
- Before Taylor Russell was cast, several major A-list stars turned down the lead role because they felt the script was too risky.
- The original script for Escape Room was written over a decade before production finally began in 2019.
Escape Room is a 2019 American psychological horror film directed by Adam Robitel. Six strangers receive mysterious puzzle boxes that invite them to participate in an escape room challenge with a $10,000 prize. When they arrive, they discover the rooms are not recreational puzzles but lethal traps โ an oven room that heats to fatal temperatures, a frozen lake that cracks beneath their feet, a psychedelic room that poisons the air โ designed by a shadowy organization that has been studying and targeting each participant based on traumatic events from their pasts.
The escape room concept was cleverly deployed, with each room's design reflecting the specific trauma of a targeted participant and requiring group cooperation under fatal time pressure. The film earned $155 million worldwide on a $9 million budget, an impressive return that demonstrated the commercial potential of the escape room concept as a horror framework and spawned a sequel.
