A Hollywood Studio Has Done the Unthinkable!
By Dustin Rowles | Posted Under Trade News | Comments (25)
After Hugh Jackman and his Wolverine scored $180 million at the box office and spawned a sequel, 20th Century Fox apparently decided: Fuck it. Why don’t we do something crazy. Something insane. Something that no one expects! Let’s make the sequel good!
Yes. 20th Century is planning the unthinkable: They want to make a sequel that people actually might want to see, instead of just seeing it out of some misguided obligation to the box-office Gods (see: Transformers 2, G.I. Joe). FOX has bravely gone out and hired a legitimate goddamn screenwriter for the sequel. Out goes the original’s screenwriter, Skip Woods (Swordfish) and David Benioff (Troy), and in comes a man who knows a little something about writing a script: Oscar winner Christopher McQuarrie.
We all know McQuarrie around here: He penned The Usual Suspects, directed the underappreciated The Way of the Gun, and also scripted last year’s Valkyrie, a script so decent, it made Tom Cruise a star again.
McQuarrie also has some X-Men associations: He’s close buds with Bryan Singer (they were former roommates and broke into the business together), the director of the first two X-Men movies. In fact, McQuarrie wrote a draft of the X-Men script that was ultimately rejected. So, he knows his way around the material, has a nice dark edge, and he’s 3 for 3 in the scriptwriting department. Plus, in all honesty: He’s working with a pretty great character, and in Hugh Jackman, a man with some versatility. Hopefully, the studio will give McQuarrie and, presumably director Gavin Hood, a little free reign this time around, and allow them to make a movie someone actually wants to see so that, in the end, they can completely fuck over the franchise with a third movie!
Follow @pajiba
← Law Abiding Citizen Trailer | Who Wants to be a Millionaire Review →
Comments
Posted by: Trammell at August 14, 2009 10:54 AM
That's incredible. The first 2 Xmen movies were so good, and then came Wolverine - such a disappointment. So we're glad to hear that somebody who actually knows how to write and knows something about Xmen will be doing something with this.