While many fans point to “The Sixth Sense” as the best movie by writer and director M. Night Shyamalan, there are many who prefer his second film “Unbreakable” and have been hoping for years for a sequel.
Many of those involved with the production have said they’d love to make a second installment, including Shyamalan and actors Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson.
But will we ever see the sequel?
“I talked to [Shyamalan] over the holidays, and he is still thinking about doing the fight movie between me and Sam that we were gonna do,” Bruce Willis tells MTV. “We chose to do the origin.”
He says he’s up for it as long as Jackson is.
Michael Falkner says
I might be the only person on the planet who liked “Unbreakable”, and I would love to see what else they can do with it.
Summer Brooks says
Michael, you are not the only one who liked “Unbreakable”. I spent some time back when the movie came out explaining to a couple friends of mine how to look at the movie differently. I explained that if you looked at the movie as if it was a live action graphic novel, the character dynamics made more sense. I was having problems with that myself while watching the movie in the theater, but I had a flash of insight during the scene where SLJ tells off the father who wants to buy a gift for his young son, and for me, it was confirmed during the reveal at the end.
Once I made that leap, it shifted the entire tenor of the movie and for me, made it 250% better. I tried using that explanation with my friends, and two of them got it, but the other one still didn’t. It wasn’t lost on me that the two who got it were readers of comic books, like I was, and the one who didn’t never got into comics.
I always wondered why there weren’t followup stories in graphic novel form… it would have been a great way to continue the stories and also build a fan base with the group of people most likely to understand and enjoy more movies later down the line.
I’m still a fan of M. Night’s work, but I’ll admit that “The Village” flat out pissed me off. “The Last Airbender”, if it’s done right, has a great chance of finally helping me forgive him for “The Village” ๐
Arkle says
You’re not alone. Far from it. IRL anyway. Off the internet the majority of people I know (family, co-workers, roommate, etc.) liked or even loved Unbreakable. The only people I know of who absolutely hated it I met on-line.
Lon says
You are not alone. I love “Unbreakable” and still think it is the best thing Shyamalan has done. Take all the money, you are gonna make from “The Last Airbender” and make the sequel! Please!
D. C. says
No, you are not alone. I count Unbreakable as M. Night’s best movie so far. A sequel to it would be far more welcome than a sequel to The Happening. You guys were spot on during the podcast. M. Night is a very skilled director who is not a good scriptwriter.
ObiWanLee says
I loved Unbreakable! Personally it’s my favourite of all Shamalaladingdongs films!
๐
I would love to see a sequel.
lows says
I never understood it and I have seen it three times. Ah well.
Tim
Nick says
I don’t understand what about Unbreakable is hard to understand, Tim.
As for The Village, Summer, I feel that your opinion of it is very much like that of the people described not liking Unbreakable. The way I see it is people went to go see a horror flick with a big plot twist… When it really was a good love story with horror/suspense elements. (And still a pretty good plot twist in my opinion, although I guessed it half way through the movie.)The problem was because M. Night was pretty much type cast as a horror movie director and so he had to pitch it that way or the studios probably wouldn’t go for it as well as the general, slow-witted American population. So he put out a trailer that was misleading in a way, with emphasis on horror.
The same thing happened with Unbreakable… The trailer had to appeal to the idiocy of the American majority, with emphasis on action, when it really was a good movie with character development and emotion.
But when everyone hated The Village, I’m sure he took it personally. Who wouldn’t? So in his next movie, he took shots at movie critics. The critics didn’t like this of course… So they went for the throat. And the critics’ opinions pretty much influenced all of the morons and convinced them to turn on M. Night.
Then The Happening… happened. Realizing he’d been turned on, he cranked out a bad movie to try and win some support back from the ignorant populous. So this time he did make a less than stellar movie and this reinforced everyone’s misguided opinions of him. When in reality, the movie was better than most of the horror crap that gets released these days. (Saw 2 and on, all of the little, wet girl ghost movies and other crap like that.) But compared to his good work, it wasn’t good.
Hopefully Airbender will redeem him. I can’t see how he’d mess it up and it’s got action in it for the idiots. Then we’ll get the movie we’ve all been waiting for since we’ve seen Unbreakable… Unbreakable 2! It’s amazing to me that the whole reason we didn’t get it sooner is because the idiots I talk about didn’t like it. So he doubted his great movie and the rest is history. He originally planned it to be a trilogy, but abandoned it because of the IDIOTS. Damn idiots.
Summer Brooks says
@Nick, the problem with The Village was that it wasn’t horror… it was a poorly veiled social commentary that was marketed to us as a mystery/suspense. The real “monster” was manufactured fear being wielded by a handful of people “in the know” to control the community (people who’s reasons for forcing others to live their fantasy were selfish and petty at best, or controlling and possibly psychologically abusive at worst), and whether you figured it out part-way through the movie, or didn’t realize it until the end and were so pissed off at the twist ending that you wanted to put your fist through whatever device you were watching the movie on, it was still a cheap, thoughtless, useless excuse for a trick ending.
Yes, he pissed me off with that movie ๐
Why? I’d come to expect better from him because of the elegance of Sixth Sense, and the complex underpinnings of Unbreakable, and he delivered something that’s of poorer quality than an overhyped Ben Stiller “comedy”. It’s almost as if there were too many different fingers manhandling the story notes for The Village, and the movie couldn’t figure out what real story it wanted to tell.
I will say that I believe he was given more autonomy after the success of Signs, but I didn’t like Signs. I didn’t despise it, but I didn’t like it either. However, I am probably one of the few people who liked Lady in the Water. Yes, it got a little heavy-handed in a couple places, but I thought the story was light years better than The Village.
I don’t know what happened with The Happening. I haven’t been able to get all the way through it yet.
As for a trilogy for Unbreakable, I can see more stories in that arc, but I wouldn’t exactly say it’s something I was holding my breath waiting for. i do think that if he’d played it smart, he would have done the second Unbreakable story as a graphic novel, and let the sales of that story prove that there’s money to be made in a followup movie.
Brian Brown says
I’m also a big fan of Unbreakable.
Does it really need a sequel??
Ugh. The Village…. don’t get me started.
Frank says
Tim, borrow a dvd of it and watch the deleted scenes. One in particular clarifies what happened between the Bruce Willis character and his wife that really helped me. But its this “talk about it afterwards to get the backstory” element that I love about the movie, having it all make sense, but not having everything spelled out for me is a pleasure rarely savored.