When Eli Roth‘s directorial debut Cabin Fever first hit theater screens back in September 2003 it had been riding a mighty wave of hype following several successful film festival showings.

Unfortunately that hype and the modest marketing muscle that a pre-Saw Lionsgate (back when they were Lions Gate) could muster couldn’t translate to boffo box office for Roth’s movie. Despite the failure of Cabin Fever to become a new blockbuster horror franchise the film managed to gross $30 million worldwide off a $1.5 million production budget and did even better on home video.

Roth was even interested in doing a sequel, albeit one that featured a delusional minor character from the original spreading a skin-rotting disease via acts of sodomy (and it was to be a Disney-style animated musical too). Lionsgate wasn’t interested in Roth’s off-off-off-the-wall concept so they hired up-and-coming horror filmmaker Ti West (The House of the Devil) to make a more-conventional follow-up. The resulting feature, Cabin Fever 2: Spring Break, sat on the studio’s shelf for three years and was subject to multiple re-edits and re-shoots before the final product was finally released on DVD early last year to mixed reviews, some more negative than others (you can read my review here ).

Now the Indomina Group, a film production and distribution company based in the U.S. and the Dominican Republic, has optioned the rights to produce two more Cabin Fever sequels and has already began development on them. The sequels even have names: Cabin Fever: Patient Zero and Cabin Fever: Outbreak. Patient Zero is being written by Jake Wade Wall (the remakes of When a Stranger Calls and The Hitcher) and Outbreak will be scripted by Adam and Deborah Marcus. Adam Marcus is best known for directing the 1993 Friday the 13th sequel Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday and the 2008 DTV Val Kilmer action flick Conspiracy and is one of the credited writers on the upcoming Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot Leatherface 3D.

The plot of Patient Zero follows a group of vacationers on a cruise in the Caribbean who must fight to stay alive when their ship collides with an abandoned research vessel unleashing a flesh-eating virus similar to that which plagued the characters in the first two movies. Outbreak will focus on a doctor and his family who travel to an island in the Caribbean and encounter….you guessed it, a flesh-eating virus that threatens the lives of everyone on the island and the whole of mankind unless they act fast.

Indomina Group Vice Chairman and CEO Jasbinder Singh Mann, who will also be serving as an executive producer on the new sequels, said of this recent development:

Indomina is fast becoming a major player in global independent film production. The company is currently developing a live-action Afro Samurai feature starring Samuel L. Jackson and is also producing and/or distributing films either starring or directed by fanboy-friendly names like Simon Pegg, Johnnie To, Tsui Hark, and Yuen Woo Ping.

The two Cabin Fever sequels will be filmed back-to-back and original Cabin Fever producer Hypotenuse Pictures will co-produce them with Indomina.

No directors have been hired to helm either movie as of yet.

[Source: Indomina]