Did you enjoy last year’s San Andreas, the earthquake thriller starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as search-and-rescue pilot Raymond “Ray” Gaines, a similarly macho man with two first names, one of which is always written inside quotation marks? Were you entertained watching the entirety of Los Angeles and San Francisco get systematically destroyed by Mother Nature herself? Did you like that part where Raymond “Ray” Gaines avoids death approximately 600 times via helicopter, parachute, stolen truck, borrowed plane, boat, and just general badassery? And did you find yourself thinking, at the end, “Wow, I’d watch that entire movie again, except named after a different fault line, but like, same cast and writer and director and everything?”
We’ve got good news for you, then: According to The Hollywood Reporter, essentially everyone involved in San Andreas is already working on a sequel. This is because San Andreas made $473 million worldwide, because The Rock is a proven international audience draw, and because actual Americans (and foreigners, apparently) love watching fictional Americans get swallowed up by the gaping maw of the Earth.
Though New Line has hired new writers, Neil Widener and Gavin James, to pen the film, director Brad Peyton is set to return, as is Johnson, because literally nobody else would be believable in a role that involves, essentially, getting into a protracted fistfight with the planet. Producer Beau Flynn is returning, as well, as is Alexandra Daddario as Johnson’s daughter, Carla Gugino as Johnson’s estranged-then-not-estranged wife, and Paul Giamatti as a seismologist who is about to have another very bad day at the office.
Though THR writes, with a vaguely troubling pun, that “plot details for the new installment are being sheltered,” San Andreas 2: Sans Andreas will “expand the disaster locales by going global.” This time around, the film will focus on the Ring of Fire, a series of fault lines and volcanoes that circle the Pacific Ocean and that, according to scientists, are home to about 90 percent of the world’s earthquakes. In other words, The Rock and his cohorts will fall into a burning ring of fire, they’ll go down, down, down, and the flames will go higher, but ultimately, they’ll be fine, because they’ll need to make a third one of these.
