It’s a good week for the creative team involved in found footage superhero saga Chronicle. Yesterday, rumours began to break that director Josh Trank was being targeted by Sony to take on its planned Venom spin-off. We pondered whether writer Max Landis might add scripting duties on that film to his busy work plate, but he’s just scored something else that will keep him off the streets for a while: he’ll write the Chronicle sequel.
The film, which saw three teens played by Dane DeHaan, Alex Russell and Michael B. Jordan getting telekinetic powers from a strange glowing substance, has earned $105 million worldwide after just 33 days in cinemas. Not bad for a movie that cost around $12 million to produce.
Naturally Fox is looking to go to that well again and we'd say hiring the man who wrote the script seems like a smart move.
Be forewarned: we’re about to get into SPOILERS here for anyone who hasn’t seen the first movie. Nothing has been said about what the sequel might, er, chronicle (sorry, but it had to be done), though the first film ends with Jordan’s Steve dead, DeHaan’s Andrew seemingly joining him in the afterlife and Russell’s Matt travelling the world on a search for a little meaning after the tragic events. Could the new story move away from the found footage style? We’ll have to wait and see. As for a director, we’re not sure Trank will be back, but he might just feel protective of his shared baby.
As we mentioned above, it’s not as if Landis has been sitting around tweeting every few minutes (even if it feels like he has, sometimes) since completing work on the first film. He’s got several scripts at various stages bubbling away in development, including one of the many Frankenstein projects and Pied Piper at Fox, mercenary comedy Good Time Gang and adventure thriller Amnesty, which has Ron Howard attached.