One of many extra surprising movie hires lately is that of enlisting British style director Ben Wheatley, the maker behind the pitch-dark folks horror “Kill Checklist” and the wacky warehouse shootout movie “Free Hearth,” to direct the sequel to “The Meg”.
The 2018 first movie concerning the large prehistoric shark was helmed by household movie veteran Jon Turteltaub, the person liable for the “Nationwide Treasure” franchise together with feel-good films like “Cool Runnings,” “Whereas You Had been Sleeping” and Disney’s “The Child”.
Wheatley is nearly the polar reverse of that, so how would he deal with the constraints of a PG-13 large shark film? With quite a lot of planning, it appears.
In a chat with Whole Movie (by way of Slashfilm), Wheatley revealed a method he was in a position to keep away from the brand new movie’s finances blowing out like so many different movies this yr have. Particularly he went old style and used downtime throughout COVID to map out the complete movie forward of time:
“By the point I obtained to ‘The Meg,’ I’d carried out quite a lot of results work, and I had an inkling of it. And due to the pandemic, I had an additional six or seven months, so I storyboarded the entire thing, each body of it. So once we got here to start out it, there was a large quantity of prep that had been carried out. I don’t like the thought of those tales of individuals making it up on the day. I wished each greenback on display screen.”
Certainly, the price of filmmaking has develop into an enormous subject in current months as a result of exorbitant budgets and franchises like Marvel and “Mission: Inconceivable” discovering themselves in manufacturing or reshoots versus getting in with a transparent plan forward of time.
The primary movie was made on a finances or round $130-178 million, although it famously needed to swallow a few years of growth prices. That gained’t be the case with the sequel, which hopes to seize the box-office in the way in which the primary movie did with its $530.2 million haul.
“Meg 2: The Trench” opens in cinemas on August 4th.