Warning: This article contains some vague spoilers about The Invisible Man. Proceed with caution.
Franchises have dominated Hollywood for a while now, and it may be hard to remember a time when not all multiplex movies got sequels or didn’t exist as part of some Cinematic Universe. And yet the number one movie at this weekend’s box office may never get a Part 2. That picture is The Invisible Man, and if you’re one of the many who saw it, you know it has a pretty definitive, clean-cut capper. Turns out there’s a reason for that: Its director, Leigh Whannell, made it with no plans for a follow-up.
“I haven’t put any thought into a sequel,” Whannell told EW before the film’s release. He continued:
“I’m a pretty superstitious filmmaker. I don’t want to jinx anything. I’ve been involved with movies that have had a lot of sequels, like the original Saw film obviously spawned a whole franchise, as did Insidious. But I can tell you with total honesty that in the case of both of those films I never thought about a sequel. I would never want to jinx the release of a movie by thinking about what comes next.”
Of course, Whannell said that before his movie — the latest iteration of H.G. Wells’ classic sci-fi/horror novel, most famously adapted in 1933 with Claude Rains as the anti-hero — grossed $29 million at the North American box office, handily making back its reported $7 million budget. Over the weekend, the filmmaker, who also co-created the Saw franchise, signed a first-look deal with Blumhouse, who produced The Invisible Man. That doesn’t mean we’re getting The Invisible Man 2, but it’s not not a possibility.
Meanwhile, we are already getting another movie based on the Wells novel: Elizabeth Banks signed up in late 2019 to direct The Invisible Woman, which presumably will follow a different character also learning the joys of not being seen. It’s also safe to assume it won’t be a reboot of the 2013 period docudrama of the same name, directed by and starring Ralph Fiennes, who played Charles Dickens, and Felicity Jones as his younger mistress.
(Via EW)
