Edge Of Tomorrow 2 Director Doug Liman Doesn’t Think The Sequel Needs To Be Bigger

Back in 2014, Edge of Tomorrow hit theaters. It was a film that didn’t have the greatest marketing campaign, and couple that with the fact that Tom Cruise’s most recent film, Oblivion, had disappointed. With that in mind, many moviegoers weren’t really lining up to see Cruise’s latest sci-fi outing. As a result, the film almost failed. It took in an abysmal $28 million in its opening weekend.

However, thanks to great word of mouth, the film managed to do just okay in theaters. Not great, but okay. It wasn’t until its home release that it seemed like audiences had caught on. Yes, Edge of Tomorrow was a genuinely good movie. And not just good. Exceptional. Now, here we are, three years later, and a sequel to the movie actually seems to be in the cards. But of course, the fear lingers. Just what would this film entail? Would this one go the typical Hollywood route, where the filmmakers feel the need to go bigger and bigger?

Speaking with the Happy Sad Confused podcast, director Doug Liman alleviated our concerns that that’s what they’d be shooting for.

“I think what people tend to do with sequels is they just make them bigger. And I’m like, ‘No, a sequel should be smaller.’ You did the first film as sort of the ad campaign for the sequel. Now you don’t need as much action, and in the case of Edge of Tomorrow, people obviously loved the comedy and they loved the situation… so we can do way more focus on Tom’s character and Emily Blunt’s character, and there’s a third character in the sequel that’s gonna for sure steal the movie. We can focus on that. I don’t need an action sequence every two minutes.”


RELATED: The Real Reason Doug Liman Is Making Edge Of Tomorrow 2


Liman also gave some more direct hints as to where the story can lead, which sounds all sorts of interesting to us. However, if you’re worried this could lead to an over-bloated barrage of sequels, perhaps you should be happy, because it sounds like Liman only has a two-film vision.

“I see this as a two-movie franchise; there’s the completion of the story we set up in the first movie and the relationships between Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt—because, remember, at the end of the first movie, she doesn’t know who he is—and that’s gonna launch us into an amazing new direction.

“It does pick up right where we left off, but it doesn’t keep going forward, because we’d screw with time, because the aliens screwed with time.”

This admittedly does give us a bit of hope. As someone who adored the first film (and who enjoyed the light novel on which the film was based), I was disappointed that it didn’t get the initial reception from fans that I thought it deserved, and I was even more nervous that they were going to further exploit this in a story that had nothing to do with the original idea.

But what could this idea entail? What will it bring to the table that we didn’t have in the first one? Liman discussed how there won’t be as much battlefield stuff, as this upcoming flick will work both as a prequel and sequel (and he said that once we see the film, we’ll know exactly what he means buy that).

“It’s mostly not on the battlefield, so there’s a whole new arena of fights we’re going to do using a lot of the technology, but also, because it is a prequel, it’s a lot of the precursor stuff. I’m really interested in the details of that… Like batteries, do they run out on these suits? I mean, they must have batteries. Or he gets stuck with the menu in the wrong language, just the reality of that menu stuck in the wrong language when you’re in the middle of a battlefield and aliens are all around you and you gotta get the suit working again, that detail gives you drama and excitement. And humor. In the sequel, I’m creating an environment where I get to have even more of those details.”

He’s slowly working me over. I expected to come out of this interview equally as skeptical, but it seems like his focus is on the right aspects of the first film. If he could actually deliver on creating something that helps to really expand on that mythology that he created, it can be a huge help to the sequel, and in helping give it more credibility with fans.

What do you think of Liman’s statements? Are you finding yourselves a bit more confident in Live Die Repeat and Repeat? Now all they have to do is change that title…

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SOURCES: Happy Sad Confused Podcast (via Collider)

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