Hollywood has announced that a couple of sequels to recent hits are on their way. Despite the fact that most people agreed it wasn’t very good, Clash Of The Titans has made a fair amount of money (nearly $400 million) at cinemas and so Warner Bros has decided it’s well worth making a follow-up.
And they want it in a rush, as Deadline is reporting that the studio would like to get it into cinemas as early as spring 2012. Green Lantern scribe Greg Berlanti is already knocking a story treatment into shape, although someone else will actually write the script. However it’s going to have to go ahead without director Louis Leterrier, who has apparently already decided he doesn’t want to return (maybe he’s still desperately hoping fate will magically get him the job directing The Avengers), although Sam Worthington and the rest of the cast are likely to sign up for another go-around.
Another recent movie to get a sequel is How To Train Your Dragon. The film was seen as a disappointment on its first weekend in cinemas, but it stuck around at the bocxoffice and returned to the top of the charts last weekend, ensuring it’ll make a substantial amount of money. As a results Dreamworks has sent out a press release, which quotes Jeffrey Katzenberg as saying, “2010 is off to a strong start, thanks in large part to the performance of How to Train Your Dragon, which – having grossed nearly $375 million to date in worldwide box office – has become DreamWorks Animation’s next franchise. We plan to release the sequel theatrically in 2013.” Three years is a fairly quick turnaround for an animated film, but certainly not impossible, especially as a lot of the hard work – creatings and modelling the characters – is already done.
It also seems New Line is still keen to make a sequel to Journey To The Centre Of The Earth. God knows why as the Brendan Fraser film was rubbish and didn’t make a huge amount of money. The problem at the moment seems to be that Fraser wants original director Eric Brevig to return, but that’s not possible if the studio sticks to the plan to release the movie at the end of 2011 (Brevig is currently hard at work on Yogi Bear). So at the moment its slightly stuck, but the film may end up ditching Fraser (if he stays lotal to Brevig) and centring things on Josh Hutcherson’s character instead.