Max Landis, noted screenwriter and comic fan, penned the script for found-footage super hero film ‘Chronicle’. The low-budget film proved to be a surprise hit and sequel talk arose almost immediately. However, this past summer, Landis announced that neither he nor director Josh Trank were working on the sequel. Instead Fox was going in a different direction with the second film.
In the first movie, the three lead characters encounter a bizarre– most likely extraterrestrial– crystal underground then wake up to discover that they have been endowed with super human powers… which they then abused by playing pranks and basically acting like teenage jackasses.
There was no further elaboration as to the source of these powers, but Landis has spilled as to the nature of these crystals and what he had planned for the sequels. Yes, sequels plural!
Landis submitted a pitch for a second film, but Fox considered it too dark, featuring “two embittered souls as antiheroes trying to catch the survivor of the first film” so they passed and are moving forward with their own project. Landis actually had in mind a trilogy for these films and revealed that the subterranean crystals were actually “Massive Organic Geoelectric Objects” or in other words, “a race of crystalline organisms that communicate and propel themselves through radio waves, and turn higher life forms into telekinetic drones.”
I would venture to say that they didn’t have much control over the three guys in the first movie as they went completely off the rails. But perhaps that would have evolved over the course of subsequent films.
Fox is now proceeding with their own sequel, so we’ll have to wait and see how that turns out. Obviously, they won’t be utilizing any of Max Landis’ concepts. Will it succeed regardless?
What do you think? Would you have liked to have seen Landis’ take on film? Are you interested to see what Fox has in store?
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