Universal Pictures and Blumhouse Productions is drumming up interest for its next Purge film, and the new promo image is definitely a shot at Donald Trump.
The new film, The First Purge, got a shoutout on Universal Horror’s Twitter account, complete with a familiar-looking red hat.
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It’s a simple image, with a white background and nothing more than the red hat with white lettering that reads “The First Purge,” along with the July 4 release date. But there’s no mistaking that it’s patterned after the “Make America Great Again” hats from Trump’s campaign.
It’s not like the franchise hasn’t taken shots at Trump before, either. The last Purge movie was called The Purge: Election Year and featured the tagline “Keep America Great,” as opposed to “Make America Great Again.”
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#TheFirstPurge pic.twitter.com/pAPTJLcIBt
— Abigail (@UniversalHorror) January 30, 2018
The Purge gets political
The Purge series is set in a dystopian reality in which the United States allows all crime to be legalized for a 12-hour period. That includes murder and other horrendous crimes.
The whole setup is maintained by the New Founding Fathers of America, an extremist group that uses the Purge to keep themselves in power.
The First Purge will examine, as the title suggests, the very first time that the nation experiments with this 12-hour free-for-all.
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Universal’s synopsis explained how the movie would examine the political and moral reality that led to the Purge:
“To push the crime rate below one percent for the rest of the year, the New Founding Fathers of America (NFFA) test a sociological theory that vents aggression for one night in one isolated community. But when the violence of oppressors meets the rage of the marginalized, the contagion will explode from the trial-city borders and spread across the nation.”
It’s always been a story about political extremism, but in the age of Trump, The Purge series may also hit a little closer to home this time around.