Anyone who thinks Ridley Scott isn't thinking "franchise" as he goes into this May's Robin Hood is crazy-- you don't make an origin about one of history's most famous characters just to leave it at the moment that Robin first meets Maid Marian. But the nice thing about Scott is that he's been in the business long enough not to beat around the bush about his plans. In an article about the movie in The Times Online, Scott admits straight out his plans for this origin story:
“It is the beginnings of how the man becomes known as Robin the Hood. You don’t really get that until the last few minutes. When you realise that ‘Ah, this is who he is.' Let’s say we might presume there’s a sequel.”"Honestly, I thought why not have the potential for a sequel, particularly if it is a genre that you absolutely love and has never been fully explored? If there were to be a sequel to Robin Hood, you would have a constant enemy throughout, King John, and you would follow his reign of 17 years, and the signing of Magna Carta could be Robin’s final act.”
In the rest of the article Scott and Russell Crowe talk about their movie's relationship to Robin Hoods of yore-- mostly claiming that theirs is an entirely new take, of course. Nothing in the article is nearly as revelatory as what Scott is willing to admit about his sequel plans, and at this point, with virtually no information about the movie other than a vague hope it might be as good as Gladiator, it's hard for us to even know if we ought to hope for a second Robin Hood from these guys. But now we at least know that we ought to keep an eye out for it.
