The Meg made a splash at the box office in 2018, and Jason Statham is ready to get in the water again with filming on the sequel imminent.
The Jason Statham shark thriller The Meg came with all the cheesy promise of being a big budget dud when it released in 2018, but the action movie surprised everyone by racking up a $530 million worldwide gross and virtually securing a sequel there and then. Therefore, The Meg 2: The Trench is on its way, and shooting is all set to begin in the UK next week at Warner Bros. Studios Leavesdon. Jason Statham will be reprising his role of Jonas Taylor in the sequel and will no doubt be coming up against one, or possibly more, prehistoric fish in a movie that may find itself jumping the shark.
High Rise director Ben Wheatley last gave a vague update on the sequel’s progress back in June, commenting in an interview with NME that “if what Jason Statham is saying in the press is to be believed” the film would be moving into production in January 2022, and it seems that the Expendables star was to be believed after all.
Based on the Steve Alten novel, Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror, the rights to the story that would eventually become The Meg were bought by Disney back in the 1990s, but after years of development hell, Warner Bros. picked up the rights and the movie was greenlit in 2015. Costing upward of $130 million, the film’s $530 million box office stats didn’t quite match up to the critical mixed reviews, which seems to be the norm with general, run-of-the-mill blockbuster movies. However, review aside, the figures added up enough for Warner Bros. to invest in a sequel and it looks like we will now be getting The Meg 2: The Trench sometime in 2023.
Director Ben Wheatley Says There Is a Lot Of Pressure Coming In to Work on The Meg 2
Joining a franchise once the original tone has been set and the money has been rolling in comes with “a heavy responsibility” according to Wheatley. In April last year he teased what is to come from the movie in an interview with ComicBook.com. He said:
“A lot of it is respecting The Meg, and trying to make sure it’s a great Meg film. As you can see from the movies I’ve made, they’re not necessarily, it’s not … when you go and do Doctor Who, I don’t completely change it because I wanted to do it. I didn’t want to necessarily make it something completely different that nobody recognised, you know? So there’s that element of back and forth.”
Wheatley continued on, heightening fan expectations of something even bigger than The Meg coming their way in the sequel. He added:
“But it’s an opportunity to do action on such an insanely large scale, that it’s just unbelievable. From doing Free Fire, which was, I thought, was all my Christmases came at once in terms of action, this is just unbelievable. And just doing the storyboards for it, just thinking and going, ‘Oh,’ it’s just … I feel a heavy responsibility for it, to make sure that it kind of delivers on all the, to all the big shark fans out there.”
