Back in 2008, Wanted came out and was a decent hit for Universal. Based on a comic miniseries by Mark Millar and J.G. Jones, the film starred a relatively unknown James McAvoy and managed to turn make $340+ million on a $75 million budget. Ever since, rumblings of a sequel have ranged from “Oh, definitely!” to “We’ll see.” Well, Coming Soon had a chance to speak with that film’s producers and find out what the status of that film is- now that we’re six years removed from the original. One of them, Marc Platt, was willing to speak candidly about where they are in that process.

His answers, though, lead me to believe that we’re still at the “wait and see” stage and, with so much time having gone by, I get the feeling it would take a major development for this thing to happen.

Here’s what Platt said about the state of things:

“We have a script that’s getting pretty good. To do a sequel when it wasn’t really set up for a sequel–one of our main characters dies in it. You don’t want to just retread a similar story, but when we get the script to a certain bar, there will be a sequel. It’s taken a while because it’s challenging, as I said, because we lost a main, main character, so where that James McAvoy character goes now… we have good ideas though. It’s coming along.”

When a Hollywood producer goes on the record with phrases like “pretty good” and indicates that the script is not yet up to “a certain bar [of quality],” that says a lot. Producers are, at their core, salesmen. They get all the money together, they put together the teams, they help fan the flames of hype for a project. Platt does not sound like he’s anywhere near ready to put his promotional muscle behind Wanted 2, and that tells me none of us should be holding our breath for it. And you almost have to ask: What’s the point of chugging along with a sequel so far removed from its predecessor when it’s clear that there wasn’t an ingenious spark in the writers room to motivate a sequel to begin with?

Speaking of writers, what’s up with Mark Millar? He was very much involved with Wanted the first time around. Will he have a hand in the sequel, which won’t be based on any books since Millar never wrote any follow-ups? 

“He’s always going to be involved but he’s not going to write the screenplay which is far along, as I said, but he’s always going to be involved because the tone he puts forth is so much his tone and I think the film captured that dark humor of his really well”

So, Wanted fans, there you have it. Doesn’t look like there’s any real momentum for a sequel. You cool with that?

SOURCE: ComingSoon.net