Cube Movies in Order: The Chronological Watch Order
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As far as horror franchises go, the Cube franchise might not be one of the best or most famous ones, but it has a cult following and certainly deserves our attention. The franchise began in 1997 with the release of The Cube and has, so far, released four movies, three American ones that are one, single narrative unit, and a Japanese remake released in 2021.
In this article, we are going to bring you all the Cube movies in the proper chronological order. Alongside the chronological order, we are going to bring you some additional info on the movies and the whole franchise, mainly through answering some burning questions, but also through the production info about the movies you’re going to receive.
How Many Cube Movies Are There?
As of November 2021, the Cube franchise consists of four movies. The three American movies form one single narrative unit with a main title, a prequel, and a sequel, while the fourth movie is actually a Japanese remake of the first Cube movie and a continuation of its narrative. Here is an overview of the whole franchise:
| Film | Release date | Director(s) | Screenwriter(s) | Producer(s) |
| Cube | September 9, 1997 | Vincenzo Natali | André Bijelic Graeme Manson Vincenzo Natali | Mehra Meh Betty Orr |
| Cube 2: Hypercube | July 29, 2002 | Andrzej Sekula | Sean Hood Ernie Barbarash Lauren McLaughlin | Ernie Barbarash Peter Block Suzanne Colvin |
| Cube Zero | October 15, 2004 | Ernie Barbarash | Ernie Barbarash | Suzanne Colvin Goulding Jon Goulding |
| CUBE | October 22, 2021 | Yasuhiko Shimizu | Koji Tokuo | Vincenzo Natali |
Cube Movies in Chronological Order
This section is going to list the Cube movies in the proper chronological order. The order doesn’t coincide with the actual release order, but we’ve opted to go with the plot as a relevant factor.
Cube Zero (2004)
Director: Ernie Barbarash
Writer(s): Ernie Barbarash
Release Date: October 15, 2004
Running Time: 97 minutes
Starring: Zachary Bennett (Eric Wynn), David Huband (Dodd), Stephanie Moore (Cassandra Rains), Michael Riley (Jax), Martin Roach (Robert P. Haskell), Mike “Nug” Nahrgang (Meyerhold), Terri Hawkes (Jellico)
The film opens with a man, Ryjkin, prisoner of the Cube, trying to find a way out. After a while, it reaches a trapped room. Nozzles come out of the walls and spray it with liquid.
It confirms by the smell and the absence of taste, that it is only water. Relieved, he begins to ingest it and begins to scratch one hand, only to realize that his body is breaking down. The fluid may have contained necrotizing bacteria or an enzyme.
Either way, his body quickly dissolves, leaving only a shapeless heap of biological material. Eric Wynn, a Cube technician, feels a deep disgust when he sees this scene from his monitoring station, along with his (higher) teammate Dodd. After that, Wynn simultaneously performs a sketch of Dodd, a chat, and a mental chess game with him (with the game table in front of Dodd).
He beats Dodd with great ease. Wynn insists on knowing the whereabouts of their two colleagues, but Dodd suggests, more and more insistently, that they stop asking questions and deal with the prisoners in the Cube.
They are then ordered “from above,” asking them to record a subject’s dream, who is currently in REM sleep. The subject is Cassandra Rains. In her dream, Wynn sees how she was captured while walking in the forest with her daughter Anna.
Rains meets the other occupants of the Cube, two men and a woman. However, the soldier, like everyone else, has no memory of his former life.
From what Wynn knows, all of the Cube’s subjects faced a death penalty, and had been faced with a choice: either to be placed in the maze, after their memory was erased, or to face the death penalty. A subject can only be placed in the Cube if they have signed a form.
Cube (1997)
Director: Vincenzo Natali
Writer(s): André Bijelic, Graeme Manson, Vincenzo Natali
Release Date: September 9, 1997
Running Time: 90 minutes
Starring: Maurice Dean Wint (Quentin McNeil), Nicole de Boer (Joan Leaven), David Hewlett (David Worth), Andrew Miller (Kazan), Nicky Guadagni (Dr. Helen Holloway), Wayne Robson (Rennes), Julian Richings (Alderson)
The characters involved wake up one after the other, each at first alone, in a cube-like room with an edge length of around five meters. There are hatches on every wall of the room (including the floor and ceiling) through which one can get into the adjacent rooms. Some of the dice contain deadly traps.
The opening scene shows a man named Alderson, who wakes up alone in a cube and first looks at the adjoining rooms through the hatches. When he decides to enter one of the neighboring rooms, he is cut into pieces by a (for the time being) invisible, sharp grid and is killed.
During the course of the film, six prisoners find themselves together and consider why they were caught and how they can escape.
First, they test every cube they want to step on by throwing a boot into it. However, this method does not prove to be sufficiently safe and Rennes, one of the prisoners, dies in a trap that sprayed acid on his face. There are signs with three three-digit numbers on the hatches of each die. Leaven, a math student, tries to interpret this information.
Your first conclusion is that a cube is a trap if and only if one of its three numbers is prime. Leaven later discovers that the numbers represent Cartesian coordinates. Worth, who turns out to be one of the architects of the outer shell, gives her information about the dimensions of this shell (135 meters edge length).
Leaven can calculate that the entire building measures a maximum of 26 rooms in each dimension. With the help of the coordinates, she can calculate that the group is only seven rooms away from the outer shell. You manage to get to one side of the cube. Using a rope from their clothes, they rappel Holloway, the doctor, on the outer wall of the large cube, perhaps to find a way out.
Holloway almost crashes, but is initially caught by Quentin, the apparently good-natured policeman. Quentin, who previously had a violent argument with Holloway, in the course of which she violently attacked his trust and belief in authority over the government, to which Holloway was responsible for the Cube project, lets her fall to her death (first he tells the others, it would have slipped).
CUBE (2021)
Director: Yasuhiko Shimizu
Writer(s): Koji Tokuo
Release Date: October 22, 2021
Running Time: 108 minutes
Starring: Masaki Suda (Yuichi Goto), Anne Watanabe (Asako Kai), Masaki Okada (Shinji Ochi), Hikaru Tashiro (Chio Uno), Tokio Emoto (First Man), Takumi Saito (Hiroshi Ide), Kōtarō Yoshida (Kazumasa Ando)
A remake of the original 1997 Cube movie set in Japan.
Cube 2: Hypercube (2002)
Director: Andrzej Sekula
Writer(s): Sean Hood, Ernie Barbarash, Lauren McLaughlin
Release Date: July 29, 2002
Running Time: 94 minutes
Starring: Kari Matchett (Kate Filmore), Geraint Wyn Davies (Simon Grady), Grace Lynn Kung (Alexandra “Sasha” Trusk), Neil Crone (Jerry Whitehall), Matthew Ferguson (Max Riesler)
A young woman wakes up in a cubic room. She briefly explores the place but opening one of the exits placed in the middle of the walls, she screams, grabbed and pulled by force. Panicked and frightened, a man in a suit frantically opens the exit panels and finds that no number is listed, lamenting that he cannot find his way around.
He opens his briefcase, which is handcuffed to his wrist, but it is completely empty. Collapsed, the man cries. Awake, a man in a leather jacket explores the area and meets Jerry, who presents himself as an uneventful employee.
The man says his name is Simon and is a business consultant. Jerry has noted the peculiarities of the place, trying to find his bearings by numbering the rooms in which he walks. The duo quickly meets other prisoners.
Kate, a psychotherapist, Sasha, a blind and scared young woman, Max, a game developer, and Ms. Paley, an elderly lady with Alzheimer’s disease. They then meet the man in a suit they save as he was about to hang himself with his belt. The latter tells them that they will have to solve the code if they want to leave the premises.
The opposite wall then begins to vibrate and seems to split, advancing slowly. The group fled into the adjacent room but the colonel followed suit, refusing to be saved in spite of himself. Kate is forced to leave him and seems to see her double staring at her from across the murky wall.
Do You Have to Watch the Cube Movies in Order?
If you want to connect the whole story, it would be best if you watched the movies in order (with the exception of the Japanese film, which isn’t really part of the main American narrative timeline), but if you want to have a proper explanation of the whole universe, you can start off with Cube and then continue with Cube Zero before Cube 2.
Will There Be More Cube Movies?
So far, the future of the Cube franchise seems unclear. There have been two separate announcements of a sequel back in 2011 and 2015, but neither of them came to fruition and since then, there has been no news about a potential addition to the franchise.
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