Can we all just take a step back and appreciate how truly bonkers it is that Ben Wheatley made a sequel to "The Meg?"
Ben "Kill List" Wheatley? Ben "High-Rise" Wheatley? It's one of the most fascinating leaps from the realm of weird indie movies to studio filmmaking we've seen in recent memory. I like a good bit of escapism as much as the next guy, but I still did a double take when the dude who was known for making pitch-black movies seemingly built to avoid being traditional crowd-pleasers signed on to make the next Jason-Statham-Punching-Prehistoric-Sharks movie.
So, while it was a surprise to me that this was the big-budget franchise he jumped to, what I'm not surprised about is the word that not only is Wheatley embracing the absurdity of this franchise, he's doing so by taking the filmmaking part of it very seriously. In the recent issue of Total Film, Wheatley reveals that he was very eager to avoid a common big-budget pitfall by spending the downtime forced upon him by Covid to plan his sequel to the Nth degree.
Indecision is a problem in the big-budget realm and the core reason why we keep seeing these big franchises waffle so much film to film. Wheatley saying that he storyboarded every inch of "Meg 2: The Trench" is actually refreshing to hear. He wanted to make sure he had all the kinks worked out in advance and felt like he could put every penny of the film's substantial budget (the first film was a surprise hit, pulling in over half a billion dollars at the box office against a declared budget of $130 million) on the screen.
Read more: Slash Film
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