FINALLY, M Night Shyamalan Is Making Unbreakable 2
After 17 years, Poncho Man will return!
After seventeen years of resisting the best idea of his entire career, M Night Shyamalan has finally relented and confirmed that he plans to make the long-awaited sequel to Unbreakable - the greatest non-Marvel and DC superhero movie ever made.
He spoke to Uproxx during the marketing for latest film Split - which is a considerable improvement on most of his post Unbreakable work - to state his intentions to wrap up David Dunn's story:
“I do intend on making a final Unbreakable movie and I’m intending on doing it next.”
This is probably a great place to stop reading if you haven't seen Split and intend to. Seriously, just stop.
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Gone? Good.
The reason this news has suddenly come back to the forefront now is thanks to the excellent twist at the end of Split that sees Bruce Willis' everyman superhero reappear for a secret cameo as a news report talks about James McAvoy's split personalities. Someone watching in a diner says the media nickname for McAvoy's monster - The Horde - reminds her of another villain with a silly name who appeared a few years back, who she can't quite place the name of. The camera pans to Dunn, who says "Mr Glass".
It's a great little stinger that turns Split not only into a much more watchable prospect, but also brings it into the Unbreakable world as the middle part of a trilogy. If the first movie was Dunn's origin, this was apparently the origin of another supervillain who he will seek to bring down since the sequel, in Shyamalan's words will be "the final movie of these two movies put together.”
This is all incredibly exciting news: Unbreakable remains Shyamalan's best film, nuanced, clever and irresistibly watchable, and there was always space in that universe for a follow-up. It made money and it should have come with sequels, but it was almost as if the director was already locked on to a schedule of genre-hopping high-concept twist movies. When they stopped working he should have gone back, but at least it's happening now.
He seemingly confirmed that all three of the main characters from the series so far will return in the same interview, which is even better news:
“Yeah, I’m still close to Bruce and everybody. And obviously I’m still close to James and still in touch with Sam and all that stuff. So, hopefully that becomes a reality very soon.”
Just imagine a film where Dunn uses an incarcerated Mr Glass as a sort of Hannibal Lecter advisory figure to help bring down The Horde, referring to comic book supervillain tropes to help trap the new threat. It's almost like this could be the comic book movie genre's version of Scream, and that's quite an idea...