It has been over six years since Wanted was released, and after it took in a rather impressive $340 million from a $75 million budget, a sequel was soon promised. But the fact that it has now been stuck in development hell for just over half a decade means that most fans of the original had given up hope that Wanted 2 would ever actually get to the big screen. According to Wanted’s producers, however, there's a chance that the sequel could still happen.
During a discussion with Coming Soon to promote their upcoming Disney musical Into The Woods, producers Marc Platt and John DeLuca confirmed that a script for Wanted 2 has been prepared and that they are pretty happy with it. However, according to Platt, it sounds as though it’s still being worked on. Said the filmmaker,
"We have a script that’s getting pretty good. To do a sequel when it wasn’t really set up for a sequel – one of our main characters dies in it. You don’t want to just retreat a similar story, but when we get the script to a certain bar, there will be a sequel. It’s take a while because it’s challenging, as I said, because we lost a main, main character, so where that James McAvoy character goes now …. we have good ideas though. It’s coming along."
Warning: there are a few SPOILERS ahead regarding Wanted, so if you haven't seen the film, you may want to click away now.
At the end of Timur Bekmambetov’s relentless action spectacle, Angelina Jolie’s Fox and Morgan Freeman’s Sloan are both killed, but James McAvoy’s Westley Gibson is still alive, having defeated Sloan by killing him with a long-distance bullet. Wanted was adapted from Mark Millar and J.G. Jones’ comic-book, and Marc Platt confirmed that while Millar hasn’t been involved in the scriptwriting process his influence will still be evident.
"He’s always going to be involved but he’s not going to write the screenplay which is far along, as I said, but he’s always going to be involved because the tone he puts forth is so much his tone and I think the film captured that dark humor of his really well."
Wanted revolved around McAvoy’s character, who is a frustrated account manager that discovers he is the son of a professional assassin. He joins a secret society that is packed to the brim with killers. The film received mostly positive reviews upon its release, with Timur Bekmambetov’s efforts behind the camera coming in for huge praise. His preposterously relentless yet still delightfully stylish direction helped to make the zany plot plausible, while the sterling cast, especially the leading trifecta of James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman, kept the film grounded too. All in all, it was joyously entertaining and it reveled in being completely over the top.
But do we really need Wanted 2? Probably not. It’s been a bit too long since the original was released, and the fact that it has been dogged down in development for so long suggests that not everyone involved is happy with how it has progressed. But if Timur Bekmambetov and James McAvoy return, and they can finally lock in Chris Morgan’s script, then a lot of people will be interested to see what they can produce.
