The Meg

While attending the US-China Entertainment Summit, ‘The Meg’ executive producer Catherine Xujun Ying announced that it was “definitely the plan” to craft a sequel to the surprise summer blockbuster.

“It’s still very early stages right now, but we’re working or starting to work on it. We’d like to keep it a secret at this time.”

‘The Meg’ was never intended to be a major hit in the US.  At best, it was released as a guilty pleasure counter-programming, but it happened to arrive during a lull at the box office as summer was winding down and it seems that the American public was hungry for good ol’ escapist fun.  From the start, ‘The Meg’ was intended for foreign markets, where mindless action and its stars– like Jason Statham– are much more mainstream and popular.

This film was co-financed with China and now ranks as the highest-grossing Sino-American co-production in history, topping $528 million as of this past weekend, surpassing ‘Kung Fu Panda 3’ which made $521 million at the box office.

In China, plans are already underway to create theme park attractions based on ‘The Meg,’ which the creators have always asserted was their version of an underwater ‘Jurassic Park’.  As Ying said, “Hopefully China will have the first Jurassic aquarium.”

Also in attendance at the Summit was the film’s director Jon Turteltaub, who admitted:

“We were being laughed at by a lot of people for making this movie. Before it came out, the tracking was horrible. They were saying this is a huge mistake, Warner Brothers has blown it, China is done.”

However, there is a question as to whether this is an idea that needs to be revisited.  A lot of times, when a novelty film hits big like this, audiences lose interest quickly, because the first installment was enough to scratch that particular itch.  How do the filmmakers one-up this enormous shark?  An even bigger one?

One promising note is that ‘The Meg’ is based on a novel by writer Steve Alten and he has written EIGHT books in this series.  So at least there is source material on which to base additional movies.

Did you see ‘The Meg’?  Would you like to see more movies in this series?

Source: Variety