On Thursday, two subjects of our frequent attention — Patton Oswalt and Screen Junkies (of honest trailers fame) — sat down to discuss Oswalt’s pitch for two sequels to M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable. Oswalt is a fan of Unbreakable, it being an earnest, big budget take on the comic book genre filmed in 2000 when earnest, big budget comic book movies were more of a rarity.
Oswalt’s two hypothetical sequels are titled Unbreakables and Broken, and he indicates the newspaper clippings at the end of Unbreakable revealed the existence of other superhumans like Bruce Willis’ character. Oswalt theorizes Samuel L. Jackson’s character was building a dossier on these unbreakable people, to which Screen Junkies’ Hal Rudnick points out he’s like a bizarro Nick Fury, much to Oswalt’s delight.
After the two sequel pitches, Screen Junkies made a mashup of various Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson clips as fan trailers for both movies. It’s not even a far-fetched concept, considering M. Night Shyamalan was still discussing Unbreakable 2 as recently as five weeks ago, when he told Collider he was still hoping to make a sequel:
You’ve said that you’ve always wanted to do a sequel for Unbreakable. Is that something you’re still holding out hope for?
SHYAMALAN: Yeah, I do sometimes. I love those characters and I love that world. Of course, the whole world makes comic book movies now. At the time, it was completely novel. I remember when I made it, Disney was literally like, “Comic books?! There’s no market for comic books!” That’s all they make now! It was a hilarious conversation. I remember it. I was like, “Maybe you’re right. Maybe nobody will come see comic book movies.” They were like, “Those are people in little conventions who like comic books.” And I was like, “But, I like comic books!”
It would be interesting to see what a sequel to that would be like in the world today?
SHYAMALAN: Yeah. But the beauty of the world of Unbreakable is that you’re playing it for reality. It should never feel like a comic book movie. It feels like a straight-up drama. It’s real. You’re confronting the possibility that comic book characters were based on people that were real. That’s the premise, so the tone has to be super grounded. It would be cool.
So, he was right about there being an audience for comic book movies, but can he explain THIS?
What a twist!
