It’s standard Hollywood protocol for a sequel to any given franchise movie to be bigger and louder. But Director Doug Liman explains that for Edge of Tomorrow 2 (tentatively titled Live Die Repeat and Repeat), he wants to break from those conventions by making the sequel smaller and more personal.
In an interview with MTV’s Happy Sad Confused podcast to promote his current film (The Wall), Liman stated that his goal with the Edge of Tomorrow sequel is to create a work that’s simultaneously a prequel and a sequel – something that he said will be easier to understand when you actually watch the movie instead of simply hearing about it. But aside from that, he wants the film to feel smaller in certain places:
“I think what people tend to do with sequels is they just make them bigger. And I’m like, ‘No, a sequel should be smaller.’ You did the first film as sort of the ad campaign for the sequel, so now you don’t need as much action, and in the case of Edge of Tomorrow, people obviously loved the comedy and they loved the situation … so we can do way more focus on Tom’s character and Emily Blunt’s character, and there’s a third character in the sequel that’s gonna for sure steal the movie. We can focus on that. I don’t need an action sequence every two minutes.”
The presence of another major character is certainly an interesting matter to consider, as most of the time-travel shenanigans that happened came as a result of Cruise and Blunt utilizing the special properties of alien blood to defeat a seemingly-unstoppable menace. There’s no pre-emptive plan for a Live Die Repeat and Repeat and Repeat, though, as Liman claims that this franchise is meant to be a duology, not a trilogy:
“I see this as a two-movie franchise; there’s the completion of the story we set up in the first movie and the relationships between Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt—because, remember, at the end of the first movie, she doesn’t know who he is—and that’s gonna launch us into an amazing new direction. It does pick up right where we left off, but it doesn’t keep going forward, because we’d screw with time, because the aliens screwed with time.”
Much of the action in the original movie took place on a French beachhead, as the entire story was told over the course of several time loops covering the same battle. So to make things interesting, Liman suggested that most of the movie’s action takes off of the battlefield and will instead cover new scenarios that weren’t seen in the first film:
“It’s mostly not on the battlefield, so there’s a whole new arena of fights we’re going to do using a lot of the technology, but also, because it is a prequel, it’s a lot of the precursor stuff. I’m really interested in the details of that … Like batteries, do they run out on these suits? I mean, they must have batteries. Or he gets stuck with the menu in the wrong language, just the reality of that menu stuck in the wrong language when you’re in the middle of a battlefield and aliens are all around you and you gotta get the suit working again, that detail gives you drama and excitement. And humor. In the sequel, I’m creating an environment where I get to have even more of those details.”
Edge of Tomorrow, based on the Japanese Light Novel All You Need Is Kill, didn’t quite make a huge impression in the United States on its opening weekend, which made $28.7M in total. However, the film’s good reviews and strong word of mouth led the film to have incredibly resilient legs at the box office, with the movie ending its domestic run at $100.2M. Still, this wasn’t enough for the film to overcome its steep $178M budget – until a strong international performance of an additional $270.3M and strong home video sales across the board were evidently enough for the film to be seen as a minor success for Warner Brothers. Presuming that the sequel generates the same amount of revenue as the first one on a tighter budget, there’s a lot more room for profitability the second time around. Given how much the international market has expanded (with Tom Cruise consistently serving as a strong draw overseas), it’s also likely that the sequel will see even greater returns.
Live Die Repeat and Repeat will be directed by Doug Liman and will star Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt.
Source: MTV
