Hmm… file under ‘interesting’. Seems like Richard B. Riddick’s Chronicles may not be over after all.
David Twohy, the director of ace sci-fi flick Pitch Black and its ambitious, though much-maligned, sequel, The Chronicles Of Riddick, has used his official websiteto tentatively announce that the Riddick series, which we all thought had died when Chronicles grossed only $115 million globally in 2004, may be about to flicker back into life.
After an update on the status of the Writers’ Strike in the news section of his site, Twohy gets down to business. “Okay, okay, now on to the really important stuff like "What the fuck is happening with RIDDICK?"” he writes. “All I can say is, ‘we’re talking about it’. The DVD numbers were really good – we know that, and some potential financiers know that. But if another movie surfaces, it probably won’t be a Universal movie and probably will be an independent movie. Which means we’ll have to make it for substantially less than the last instalment. But that’s okay. PITCH BLACK was $22 million all in.
“Maybe it’s time to go back to our roots – as we go on to The UnderVerse.”
Now, we don’t know about you, but in Empire’s considered view, this is a good thing. The Chronicles Of Riddick – in which Vin Diesel’s murderous and cool anti-hero ponced around a series of cardboard-looking planets – may have been a disappointment, but at least it was an ambitious disappointment that attempted to cultivate a genuinely new cinematic sci-fi mythology. And Pitch Black, as we all know, kicks ass – so a return for Diesel and Twohy to a movie of that scale is to be applauded.
In a way, this is not new - before Chronicles came out and died its slow, horrible box office death, the duo had been talking about a trilogy of Riddick films and, even since then, Diesel and Twohy have periodically mentioned the sequel, which would see Riddick travel to the UnderVerse, essentially a world of the dead.
If you’re surprised that Diesel would don Riddick’s nifty shades again, don’t be – he’s virtually the character’s co-creator and will be heavily involved in plotting this new Riddick film, if it ever happens. And, by starring in the fourth Fast And The Furious film, he’s shown that he’s not averse to revisiting past glories in an attempt to engineer new ones.
We wish Twohy all the best in his quest – and if you know anyone with about $30 million resting in their bank accounts, give us a call and we’ll make sure Twohy gets it.