‘Crank’ Co-Director Details Why We Won’t See ‘Crank 3’ For A While

With 2006’s Crank, directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor took action to absurd levels, utilizing Jason Statham to play a man whose adrenaline was the only thing keeping him alive, forcing him to run, punch and kiss for his life. The film was popular enough to earn a sequel, Crank: High Voltage, yet that 2009 film didn’t turn much of a profit to score a third film, despite fan interest. Taylor recently shared with ComicBook.com that, not only is there not much financial profit for a studio with a Crank 3, but also the “disrespectful, politically incorrect quality of those movies” makes production difficult.

“That’s really the thing that makes it difficult these days. I don’t think you could make Crank in today’s climate,” Taylor shared. “I just don’t think you could get it through. A lot of planets need to align in order for that to happen.”

The Crank films took the action genre to heights previously never seen, with Statham’s “Chev Chelios” committing all sorts of unthinkable acts just to get his blood pumping. With films like John Wick or the Fast and Furious series, the bar for “absurd” action has been heightened to insurmountable levels.

“The one thing that I won’t do is sort of like a cheap, boring, tame version of the Crank movie,” Taylor proclaimed. “There’s been opportunities to do that, and there’s definitely been opportunities to just, for purely financial reasons, make a version that I think Crank fans would find lame. I’m just not going to do it. There’s a lot of ideas for it. There’s a lot of great ideas for a Crank movie, but it’s got to be cool. Everybody’s head’s got to be in the right place. It has to be made for the right reasons. It’s got to be creatively driven.”

Despite fan enthusiasm over the series, a studio would have to believe there’s a profitable reason for Crank 3 to exist, which there is currently no sign of.

“Because let’s face it, Crank 2 is a really cool movie, but it made like $12 at the box office,” Taylor confessed. “There’s not a strong financial reason why everybody’s trying to make this movie to get rich. There’s only one reason to make Crank 3, and that’s just because it’s super f*cking cool. If it’s not that, then it’s not worth the time. That’s really what would need to happen for that movie to exist, is for everybody to be on the same page creatively to, ‘Okay, as exponentially weirder as Crank 2 was to Crank 1, that’s how Crank 3 has to be.’”

Fans can enjoy Taylor’s compelling directorial style with the SYFY series Happy, currently airing, and catch his latest Nicolas Cage-starring thriller, Mom and Dad, hitting theaters and VOD on January 19.