Gerard Butler Sequel Just Got Bought For A Huge Price
Gerard Butler is getting a sequel to a pandemic hit that came a bit out of nowhere in the winter. It went into a bidding war for the follow-up
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It takes a special kind of guy to survive an extinction-level event and Gerard Butler is just one such dude. That’s what happened when he and his family navigated nearly every threat, natural and otherwise to make it to safety before a comet bombarded Earth back into the stone age. And now it looks like we are going to get a follow-up. Deadline is reporting that Gerard Butler and company have landed a deal for a sequel to Greenland and we are going to pick the story back up with the last of the humans making sense of the new landscape.
The deal that landed Gerard Butler in a big-budget sequel went down this week in the Cannes virtual market which focuses on pre-sales of movies and Greenland found itself in a bit of a bidding war when it was announced. STX won the honors and will pony up around $75 million for the next film in the possibly budding franchise. They handled distribution for the first film as well.
Joining Gerard Butler for the Greenland sequel will be director Ric Roman Waugh who helmed the first one. And Chris Sparling is handling the script as well after penning the first movie. This is very much the band getting back together for the second film that will likely pick up directly after the events of the first one. This next one will be Greenland: Migration which is unambiguous, at least in a general plot point way, about what will be going down in this next film.
Greenland was a surprise pandemic hit, releasing in December of last year and actually turning a profit at the box office, something that just wasn’t happening in the season leading up to the holidays, especially in the states. It follows the story of Gerard Butler as John Garrity, a dude who realizes along with the rest of the world that a comet is streaking towards Earth and is going to destroy a vast majority of the planet. He and his family are chosen to go to a safe haven in the titular Greenland to wait out the cataclysmic events and hope to survive into a new age. The film has all the disaster film hallmarks between outrunning disaster after disaster while also fighting with fellow humans.
In addition to making its money back at the box office with $52.3 million on a $35 million budget, Gerard Butler and Greenland also won over critics hitting 78% on Rotten Tomatoes and 64 on Metacritic. Considering the gestalt of the flick, these are very solid numbers. Was the success of the movie because of the pandemic or in spite of it? That much is tough to tell, but all in all, it’s a solid enough film that sticks to the core part of the story it wants to tell. It also ended up being one of the more popular streaming titles on Netflix once landing on the platform.
Before he comes back to live out the almost-end of the world, Gerard Butler has a number of movies in the pipeline including Copshop which is due out later this year. And then there’s Hair of the Dog, Remote Control, and The Plane. And he’s also got a Den of Thieves sequel in the works as well. So it’s a busy time and soon he’ll be migrating a post-disaster landscape.
