That Tarantino loved Crawl was just the sort of boost Aja needed. As he told The Hollywood Reporter, “It was such a nice surprise. I was really, really excited. I’ve met with Quentin a few times, and one of the times, we had dinner together in Paris right before I was going to make Piranha 3D. So I was pitching him all the scenes, and he was pitching me other things that he was thinking about, so I knew how much he loved these types of movies. My friend Eli Roth called me to say, ‘Hey, Quentin watched [Crawl] and really loved it.’ And then I saw the announcement online, so the fact that he really enjoyed the movie was the nicest thing ever. Sometimes, you do movies and you never know [how they’re going to be received]. But when you find an audience that also includes the critics and your peers that you admire the most, that’s why you keep trying to tell stories.”

And Aja will apparently carry that through with his upcoming sequel to Crawl, which he says is an idea he has been developing ever since the first one. “I would say that I never really stopped working on Crawl…After we were done, I kept thinking about all the other great setups that we could create, and it was really an exciting movie to make. So I wanted to really be involved in doing a sequel, and after a few troubled years with Covid and everything, I feel like we are now in a position that, hopefully next year, it might happen. So I’m excited. I’m ready to go. I’ve been lining up so many scenes and stuff, so it’s there. We just have to do it now and get back in the water.”