Galaxy Quest Director to Helm RED 2
Posted 02.18.12 by BrentJS
Sylvester Stallone's The Expendables may have been the most-hyped action movie of 2010 to star an ensemble cast of aging actors, but it wasn't the only movie of the sort that year, nor the most successful. Director Robert Schwentke's RED, which opened just two months after The Expendables and starred veteran actors Bruce Willis, John Malkovich, Morgan Freeman,
and Dame Helen Mirren, managed to net slightly more than Stallone's flick when taking into account its smaller budget.
Summit Entertainment didn't waste much time mulling over whether or not the movie's success warranted a follow-up, hiring RED screenwriters Jon and Erich Hoeber to pen a sequel only three months after RED debuted in theaters, but there's been very little news about RED 2 in the year-plus since the duo was hired. Schwentke filled up his schedule with other movies while waiting for RED 2 to get the green light, but Variety has reported that Summit is in "final negotiations" with Galaxy Quest director Dean Parisot to take the helm of the sequel.
RED is loosely based on the gritty three-issue action comic book series by writer Warren Ellis and artist Cully Hamner. The plot revolves around a group of RED — "Retired, Extremely Dangerous" — CIA operatives played by Willis, Malkovich, Freeman, and Mirren who are targeted for termination in order to cover up the fact that a presidential hopeful (Julian McMahon) committed atrocities during a secret mission in Guatemala in 1981. No details about what the sequel will be about have been revealed at this time, though Lorenzo di Bonaventura said that the intention is to "bring back the crew" — Willis, Mirren, Malkovitch, and Mary-Louise Parker, who played Willis' girlfriend — and "freshen" the cast with "one or two" new characters. According to Variety, production on RED 2 is still "a ways off yet" as Summit still needs to lock in the cast.