'The Meg' Sequel Producer Offers Status Update

Despite lukewarm reviews, 2018's The Meg was a huge hit at the box office, earning over $500 million worldwide without the buit-in audience of a major franchise film. The movie, which starred Jason Statham, Ruby Rose, and Bingbing Li, was impressive enough that fans wondered if more would be coming. According to a new interview with CinemaBlend, execurive producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura says that a second movie is in the works -- although it does not sound like it will be hurried off the assembly line too soon. His comments suggest that while they are working on getting a second movie together, he knows that the audience is looking for something that does not take itself too seriously, and they need the right script to sell the movie.

"We're working on a script, yeah," di Bonaventura said during a promotional interview for his upcoming Stephen King adaptation Pet Sematary, which hits theaters in April. "So you never know until you get a good script....I was very thankful that the audience got that we were just trying to have fun, [and] not take ourselves seriously at all." Of course, the humor in that is that star Statham was publicly less-than-thrilled by the decision to go for laughs and a PG-13, when there was a bloodier, more violent version of the movie somewhere on the cutting room floor that might have given Pet Sematary a run for its homicidal-animal money.

A sequel might be a hard sell, since many of the film's stars are difficult to pin down. Right now, Ruby Rose is starring in the Batwoman pilot, which is all but guaranteed to be picked up to series on The CW, which would mean that her availability would be severely limited. While $500 million is a great haul for The Meg, it may be less than Statham could generate for the same studio by jumping onto a popular franchise, so the availability of A-listers like him is always in question.

The Meg centered on a team of undersea researchers who, in an attempt to plumb the depths of the ocean's deepest trench, inadvertently end up catching the attention of a megalodon. The giant, extinct shark follows them from the depths up into the parts of the ocean humans regularly navigate and ends up making a beeline for land with a taste for human flesh and a size that almost no boats can even manage to contain, let alone stop. Statham played a rescue diver who lost a previous friend to a similar beast and is called in to help out when all seems lost. The film is now available on Blu-ray, DVD, and SVOD.

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