For those of you that haven’t seen Dredd, the 2012 adaptation of the popular 2000AD character starring Karl Urban as Judge, Jury and Executioner then please do yourself a favour and bump it to the top of your list of films to watch because it is fantastic. A truly underrated gem that unfortunately didn’t get the chance it deserved at the box-office.
I was lucky enough to be at a press conference in 2012 at London Film and Comic Con where writer Alex Garland, producer Alan Reich, concept artist Andrew Macdonald and Dredd himself Karl Urban debuted the first clip from the film. It was so fresh that Karl got off the stage to see it for himself. It was at this press conference that the question of a sequel was asked. Bare in mind that at this point all we had seen of the film was this one 2 minute clip. No one had seen the film, there were no trailers, I don’t think the film had even been finished yet but already we were hungry for more. At the time Garland just said;
“We’ll see a sequel if the gross is above $50 million in the US.”
However it fell short and only pulled in $13 million domestically and $35 million worldwide. So while Dredd didn’t find it’s audience, that didn’t stop it’s audience finding Dredd! While talking to Yahoo recently about Star Trek Beyond, Urban pointed the finger to Lionsgate saying;
“Dredd represented a failure in marketing. I saw the tracking of that film weeks before it came out and the fundamental problem was no one knew it was being released. Once it came out on DVD and it sold 750,000 copies in the first week alone in North America alone, it was very clear that the audience had discovered it.”
Reportedly the R Rating didn’t help either but now the climate has changed. So what does this mean for the future? Well with the undeniable success of Deadpool and with Hugh Jackman’s final Wolverine being confirmed an R Rating it seems the market is finally ready. In fact when asked about the possibility of a continuation as a series on a service like Netflix or Amazon Urban said;
“I wouldn’t be opposed to it. The fans are demanding to have more and it would be a real privilege to continue that story. There’s just a goldmine of fantastic stories in the 2000 AD Judge Dredd canon that would be really marvellous to see on screen.”
So there you have it. No Dredd 2 because of the failed marketing of Lionsgate, but maybe a Dredd series on Netflix or Amazon. I would probably prefer a series especially with Urban on board and maybe even Garland directing now that we’ve seen what he can do with last years Ex Machina.
Star Trek Beyond hits theatres June 22nd.
Source: Yahoo
