In a matter of hours, Joe Cornish’s spooky, supernatural adventure-drama Lockwood & Co. will be hitting Netflix – bringing with it the tale of teenage freelancers battling ghosts in an alternative London. And while Cornish sees a future for the show in the prospect of more series, he’s also hard at work on a sequel to Attack The Block, reteaming with John Boyega to cook up a follow-up to the Moses vs. marauding aliens tale. If it’s taking a while to come together, it sounds like Cornish and Boyega are taking their time to get it right – and looking to some of the greatest sci-fi sequels ever made for inspiration.
Speaking on Fangoria podcast The Kingcast, Cornish named a pair of all-time-great James Cameron sequels as the benchmark for Attack The Block 2. “We're very, very quietly confident and excited about what we've got,” he said. “We think about Alien and Aliens, and Terminator and Terminator 2, and we wanna take a shot at doing our version of what people did for [those movies].” At the moment, the film is in the research stages in order to craft the character story with all the care required. “Obviously, I can make stuff up about aliens quite easily, but the other stuff – the aspects of reality that we folded the fantasy into – we did a lot of research for, and so we are currently doing that same thing,” Cornish explains. “We have a very detailed treatment and a storyline we're very, very excited about – and when I say ‘we’, I mean me and John Boyega, who [I'm co-producing the film with] and consulting very closely with – and we're doing all the research to make sure we get it right."
He adds: “This very afternoon I spent two hours [interviewing] someone whose life intersects with one element of the story, and when we're done here I'm gonna go home and transcribe that. So, we're doing our due diligence in building the screenplay and taking the same amount of care we took with the first one.” Sounds like we’re in for more of a wait then – but it’s all about making the end result that bit more special. For now, we’ll be going home, locking the door, and playing FIFA.