Before Daniel Craig perfected his southern accent work with the Knives Out movies, he cut his teeth on a deep south drawl with 2017’s Logan Lucky. The caper directed by Steven Soderbergh starred Craig alongside Channing Tatum, Adam Driver, Riley Keough, Katie Holmes, Katherine Waterston, Dwight Yoakam, Sebastian Stan, and Hilary Swank. Logan Lucky was a critical darling upon its release, following a heist at a race track with a variety of colorful characters, but the film failed to do very well at the box office, grossing just over $27 million at the domestic box office. To make matters even more disappointing for fans, the film’s conclusion clearly sets up more stories in this world, and now we know there were actual plans for it too.
Speaking in a new Reddit AMA, Steven Soderbergh revealed that ahead of the film’s release they had plans for a follow-up that would happen pretty quickly afterward. When asked about a potential sequel, the filmmaker replied: “WELL, we had a prequel all teed up about how Joe Bang got thrown in jail, but when the movie didn’t perform well enough to justify another go, we dropped the idea….”
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Daniel Craig’s character Joe Bang was a major departure from the rest of his acting career. With his platinum blonde hair and deep southern accent, Craig’s Joe Bang is an explosives expert that has to be broken out of jail to even help with the scheme. As Logan Lucky makes clear, the only one who knows anything about blowing up bank vaults is Joe Bang, so a prequel about how he ended up in prison would have been great to see.
“He really had carte blanche to build this character any way he wanted,” Soderbergh told GQ about Craig’s Joe Bang preparation. “I said to him, ‘I don’t care how you look. I don’t care how you sound. And you don’t have to do any press if you don’t want to.’ Because I know that going on the Bond press tour is, for him, harder than doing the movie. So the ideas would come in in dribs and drabs. ‘Here’s some tattoos. Here’s my haircut. I’m working with a dialect guy.’ Then he showed up with it; he was ready.”
Logan Lucky can be streamed right now on Paramount+.
