The Meg 2 Has Started Production

Production is underway on the sequel to The Meg, which is expected to once again pit Jason Statham and Bingbing Li against an 80-foot prehistoric shark. In The Meg 2: The Trench, director Ben Wheatley (Rebecca, Doctor Who) will take over from action movie veteran John Turtletaub, who helmed the first movie. That creature feature killed off a huge percentage of its cast, so it’s likely that aside from two or three primary players, audiences will get to know a whole new batch of deep sea rescuers. The production will be filmed at Leavesden Studios outside London, where Warner Bros. has also filmed installments of the Batman and Harry Potter franchises, according to Variety.

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 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 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 dynamics of a sequel would be at least a little different, since Staham’s character was disgraced and treated like a delusional after the first attack, making the first movie both a horrifying experience for him, but also a redeeming one, as everyone else had to admit the “meg” was real. Presumably, the second film will take that for granted, and he will have his reputation intact.

“A lot of it is respecting The Meg, and trying to make sure it’s a great Meg film,” Wheatley shared with ComicBook.com about the new film. “And as you can see from the movies I’ve made, they’re not necessarily, it’s not … when you go and do Doctor Who, I don’t completely change it because I wanted to do it. I didn’t want to necessarily make it something completely different that nobody recognized, you know? So there’s that element of back and forth.”

He continued, “But it’s an opportunity to do action on such an insanely large scale, that it’s just unbelievable. From doing Free Fire, which was, I thought, was all my Christmases came at once in terms of action, this is just unbelievable. And just doing the storyboards for it, just thinking and going, ‘Oh,’ it’s just … I feel a heavy responsibility for it, to make sure that it kind of delivers on all the, to all the big shark fans out there.”

In recent weeks, news broke that the film was ready to go into production, although very little is still known about the plot. It could easily be either another rescue mission or just a straight-up research mission to the trench that puts our heroes back in harm’s way this time around.

Screenwriters Dean Georgaris, Erich Hoeber and Jon Hoeber are back for the sequel, along with producers Lorenzo di Bonaventura and Belle Avery, and executive producer Catherine Xujun Ying. 

h/t Variety