Warner Bros. isn’t happy with industry consensus appointing “Gran Turismo” as the weekend’s top-grossing film, beating “Barbie.” (Sony’s total included all advance shows including sneaks over two weekends. My verdict: Aggressive, yes; outside accepted standards, no). It will be small solace, but Warners’ “Meg 2: The Trench” is the dominant title on this week’s VOD charts.
“Meg 2” moved to PVOD after 21 days — a quick turnaround previously reserved for Max exclusives and/or lower-budget titles like “Magic Mike’s Last Dance” and “House Party.” However, “Meg 2” is the $130 million sequel to a film that grossed over $500 million worldwide.
It dropped Friday and quickly reached #1 at iTunes. It also is #1 at Vudu, more impressive since its chart covers seven days and “it “Meg 2” was available for only three of them. Google Play, as always lagging a few days behind, has it at #3 and rising.
The Ben Wheatley-directed thriller will be available to buy at home for $24.99 and for 48-hour rental via PVOD for $19.99 SRP on participating digital platforms, including Amazon Prime Video, AppleTV, Google Play, and Vudu, among others.
Meg 2: The Trench will also be available on 4K UHD, Blu-ray, and DVD on October 24.
The premium digital ownership, 4K UHD, and Blu-ray releases will contain the following special features: The Making of Meg 2: The Trench – Cast and crew revisit the making of the film and working with new and returning cast members, then highlight the beauty and challenges of working with a Meg they can't see!
Up From the Depths: Even More Beasts - Director Ben Wheatley, cast, and producers guide fans through the creation and design of the new creatures seen in Meg 2: The Trench.
Watch an exclusive sneak peek at “The Making of Meg 2: The Trench” via IGN
If anyone was ever in doubt about how important the overseas box office is for certain films, look no further than Meg 2: The Trench, the sequel to 2018's surprise hit The Meg, which starred Jason Statham as Jonas Taylor. The Meg was a fun, if slightly too serious film given the subject matter—enormous prehistoric shark terrorising panicking undersea fodder—but the film ended up making $529 million worldwide.
The sequel brought Ben Wheatley aboard, the director behind the harrowing and bleak movies like In The Earth, High Rise, Kill List and Sightseers. However, Wheatley's movies all have a streak of very dark humour in them, and that humour's been brought out tenfold in Meg 2, which sees Statham return to punch three megalodons instead of just one. Despite what was considered an underwhelming opening weekend of $30 million domestic, the movie has absolutely exploded overseas, reaching a total of $316 million in just 16 days. More importantly, $250 million of this has come from the international box office.
That's vitally important, for a number of reasons. Firstly, it marks 79% of the film's total gross but also underlines how crucial the international co-operation on the film is. As with The Meg, Meg 2 was a co-production between the United States and China, as CMC Pictures (China Media Capital) was a heavy contributor in the funding of the film. It also features Chinese megastar Wu Jing in a starring, and heroic, role in the movie. Jing, coincidentally, starred in The Battle of Lake Changjin, an enormous box office sensation that holds the distinction of being both the highest grossing Chinese movie of all time, the highest grossing film in worldwide history to never top the domestic box office, a distinction it may lose soon.
Fine China
The film never bashes this co-operation over the audience's head, and is all the better for it. And it's been rewarded with that worldwide haul of money, as the film continues to play very strongly overseas. Almost a third of the global takings ($94.8 million) have come from China, while the film carried a budget of $129 million. So once again, if you ever underestimated the importance of foreign markets, look no further than Statham and his shark-punching friends. Meg 3 seems all but assured at this point.
There was a time a different Fast & Furious alum might have played Jonas Taylor.
Blockbusters like Meg 2: The Trench live and die by the decisions made behind the scenes. With decades of development paving the way for the Ben Wheatley-directed return of Jason Statham’s Jonas Taylor, the hero created by author Steve Alten has waged war with prehistoric beasties yet again. Yet in earlier phases of development, another Fast Saga vet had Alten’s imagination held captive in the casting department.
This was something I had learned from my recent interview with Steve Alten, as we were gathered to honor not only the recent release of the sequel to 2018’s The Meg, but also the new collected edition of Alten novels named Meg: Legacy. As such, the past, present and future was on the table for the taking; which led Steve to reveal the most ridiculous Meg change from an earlier iteration.
However, if we saw The Meg adapted in its 1997, or perhaps even with its 2005 attempts, Steve Alten admitted to CinemaBlend that he had the following actor in mind:
I would say…Snake Plisken. Yes, a younger Kurt Russell. I thought he’d be perfect for it at the time. Jason Statham was my choice in 2016/2017.
While previously a reliable market for big Hollywood releases, an increasing number of films are underperforming in the region, making Wheatley's sequel an interesting anomaly. Much of this is due to a changed movie landscape following the COVID-19 pandemic. Avatar: The Way of Water, for example, had a strong showing in China, but Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, by contrast, significantly underperformed. The Little Mermaid, too, essentially bombed in the country.
Meg 2: The Trench's box office opening weekend in China beat Jurassic World Dominion, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, and more than doubled the take of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. A big factor in Meg 2: The Trench's international success is that the film has been designed specifically to appeal to global audiences, with a concept that is accessible regardless of language and a diverse array of actors, including Jing Wu, who is major star in China.
The fact that The Meg has spawned a sequel will be no surprise to those long-dedicated fans of the franchise, as the map for sequels has already been set out in the source material; a series of deep-diving adventure novels by Steve Alten, who spoke with Metro.co.uk about the past and future of the franchise on both the screen and page.
Alten, 63, first kicked off The Meg franchise back in 1997 with the publication of the first novel Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror. From there, began a long road to the big screen that saw the likes of Guillermo del Toro and Eli Roth come and go – but you can’t keep a good shark project down.
From Jaws to Deep Blue Sea, there’s always been a fascination with those black-eyed fish with a sharp set of teeth, something that began for Alten at a very young age.
‘When I was younger. I used to love to read, you know, picture books with dinosaurs and marine reptiles, and I know that the marine reptiles were always the ones that were much cooler to me because they had these sharp teeth, and that’s before I even learned about the big shark that came around the Miocene period over 30 million years ago.’
Similar to most of us with a love of sharks, that fascination only grew with the publication of Peter Benchley’s Jaws novel and Steven Spielberg’s 1975 film adaptation.
‘I read Jaws when I was 15 and then decided I wanted to read as much as I could about real shark attacks and real great whites.
There was always a little blurb with a black and white photo of scientists sitting in a big jaw on the Smithsonian and that led me to the Megalodon.’
That startling image of a giant set of gnashers may have caught the imagination of the young Alten, leading him to discover more about the Megalodon, but finding there was little else to read at the time, the Meg receded to the depths of his imagination, only to be reawakened some 20 years later.
After pursuing a career in sports administration and coaching, Alten was struck by a Time Magazine article featuring a deep water creature on the cover, an Anglerfish, with the article going even further into the secret world beneath the depths, and chiefly the Mariana trench.
‘Here was this 1,500-mile long, 40-mile wide, seven-mile deep gorge that was unexplored,’ Alten explains.
‘And if there were hydrothermal events in it which I was pretty sure there was, it just made sense to me that if you got all this mineralized hot water it’s rising out at the bottom at some point. It’s going to coagulate and form a ceiling of soot above it. Which would seal in the warmth and so that’s what I wrote about,’ – an ideal concept for envisioning a world where long-thought-extinct species could survive.
While a work of fiction Alten makes sure to do his research, and the idea of life forms that deep in the ocean has become less and less of a hypothetical fantasy since his original novel was published back in 1997 – although it’s doubtful a giant prehistoric beast is roaming around down there.
At the time, some critics were quick to point out the seemingly ridiculous notions of life deep in the ocean in Alten’s novels, with Alten saying one LA Times writer in particular ‘ripped it apart, everything from the name Meg to claiming that there were hydrothermal events at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.’
The impressive jaws of the Megladon (Picture: Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
‘I didn’t know it was real, but I wrote it as it was, and then it turned out to be true. So I wrote that critic into the sequel novel [The Trench] and had him killed off – anyone that wrote a bad review of The Meg got killed in The Trench,’ he recalled.
You may not recall the event that devastated our beach. To be fair, we’ve had more than our share of outside-normal climate events this year, writes Dave Davis
Two Fort Myers business owners embrace in the midst of the wreckage of their small town, devastated by Hurricane Ian less than a year ago. Dave Davis shares his experience, as a part-time resident of the popular vacation destination.
Amy Beth Bennett / Torstar file photo
“Oh, my God,” my wife said, under her breath, not once but dozens of times.
We are 35-year owners of a tiny slice of this former paradise, not able to visit it since the hurricane.
You may not recall the event that devastated our beach. To be fair, we’ve had more than our share of outside-normal climate events this year — drought, floods, forest fires, record-breaking temperatures, and Ian — a Category Five hurricane, the third-costliest weather disaster on record (over 100 billion dollars and counting) and the deadliest hurricane to strike Florida since 1935.
On Sept. 28 last year, residents along the Gulf Coast were advised that Ian was headed toward the southwestern reaches of Florida. They had days to watch it as it made its way across the Atlantic from West Africa, striking Cuba among other locations. Some models had Fort Myers Beach, a seven-mile-long island just off the coast, as its target. Many models did not, and many residents decided to ride it out. The upstairs neighbour in our condo was one of them. He video-recorded the landfall of the hurricane as it inundated the entire island, drowning it in seven feet-plus of water, tossing boats and cars like toddlers’ toys, bending the palm trees in two, ripping out foundations and plantings and trees, breaking over seawalls, smashing through windows and walls.
For a second, the pessimist in me thinks she doesn’t know what’s ahead for her, or for that matter, the planet. The optimist in me sees resilience and hope in the wave and the restoration, a symbolic hope in the meaning of nine months. On this day, in this moment, the optimist wins.
Dave Davis is a retired family doc and writer. His novels, A Potters Tale and The Last Immortal have won international awards. His latest, Two Page Tales, cowrote with the Writers in Paradise, is an anthology of short stories. All of them are available on Amazon. Visit drdavedavis.com
Meg 2: The Trench makes an impressive global debut, earning $142 million at the box office, with $30 million domestically and $112 million internationally.
Meg 2: The Trench is here to wreak havoc along the shoreline, starting its box office run with a global debut of $142 million. Out of that impressive number, $30 million was earned domestically and $112 million internationally, as the sequel marks one of the final big releases of this summer movie season. Ben Wheatley was in charge of directing the second installment, after John Turteltaub helmed The Meg five years ago. The depths of the ocean are incredibly unpredictable, and the team of scientists featured in the franchise never know what to expect once they dive into the darkness of the sea.
In the sequel, Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham) finds himself in bigger problems than the last time, as several giant creatures threaten the humans near the shoreline across different beaches. While the previous movie saw him going up against only a couple of Megs, the sequel makes a quick job of establishing that there's so much more at stake in this adventure. After an illegal mining operation is discovered in the Mariana Trench, the people in charge of it decide to blow up it up, creating an opening for the creatures that lived down there to explore the surface, and it's up to Jonas' team to stop the sea monsters before they could deal more damage.
By comparison, when the first movie introduced audiences to this new universe where prehistoric giant creatures were still alive in the depths of the ocean, The Meg earned $45 million at the domestic box office during its debut. The numbers were surprising, as analysts didn't expect the movie to make such an impact among the general audience. But the marketing that heavily featured the giant shark in mundane situations quickly gained the viewers' interest, creating a success so satisfying for Warner Bros. that it led to a sequel.
The summer of 2023 is about to get a lot more treacherous!
Yes, Meg 2: The Trench plans to make waves during the summertime box office. And director Ben Wheatley (Ideal, Doctor Who, Rebecca) who took the helm of the sequel to 2018’s The Meg promises an epic, overarching scope when it comes to the science fiction, horror and adventure mash-up!
The Meg 2: The Trench streaming release is hotly anticipated as it offers a thrilling adventure, and viewers are wondering when they can start streaming the movie.
It is a sequel to 2018’s monstrous shark movie, The Meg, which dives even deeper into the origins of the Megalodons. It pits multiple colossal, prehistoric sharks against Jason Statham’s Jonas. So, it’s understandable why fans are so eager to stream the film. Here’s when Meg 2: The Trench could be coming out online.
The Meg 2: The Trench streaming release date is predicted to be in November 2023based on past release patterns.
However, this date isn’t confirmed yet.
Meg 2: The Trench is scheduled to hit theaters on August 4, 2023, and its streaming release date will only be revealed after that. However, considering that it is a Warner Bros. Discovery movie, we can predict that the film will become available to stream between 60-90 days after its theatrical release.
The Flash is also reportedly following a similar theatrical and streaming release pattern. So, we should expect Meg 2: The Trench to swim in the same direction and arrive on MAX sometime in November 2023, if not slightly earlier.
This date is an estimation based on the information we have so far. ComingSoon will provide an update to this story once we receive official details.
Meg 2: The Trench brings Jason Statham as Jonas alongside Wu Jing, Sienna Guillory, Cliff Curtis, Skyler Samuels, Page Kennedy, Shuya Sophia Cai, and Sergio Peris-Mencheta.
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