We’ve had doctors squawking at us for years that too much salt in our diets is bad for us, but Sony clearly disagrees. On screen, at least: the studio is now throwing sending out the special sealed envelopes containing orders to get a sequel to last year’s Angelina Jolie spy thriller **Salt **moving, with Kurt Wimmer sitting down to write.
You’ll likely recall that the film found Jolie as Evelyn Salt, a CIA agent outed as a Russian sleeper agent who spends the rest of the running time doing just that – running, jumping, fighting and narrowly escaping in a bid to prove that she’s not a traitor.
Yet – Spoiler Alert! Stop reading if you have not seen the movie! – it turns out that, er, she actually is a sleeper agent, trained from birth to help bring down the US. The finale of the film sees her discovering the truth about not only herself but also fellow CIA bod Ted Winter (Liev Schreiber) and getting captured by the government. But in a final twist, she’s released from custody (by means of jumping out of a chopper into the Potomac River) and swears to stop the other sleeper agents from the program in revenge for her betrayal.
With such a big arrow pointing towards a sequel, it was only a matter of time and box office bean counting before another film was at least developed. With $300m worldwide in the bank, Sony is starting to put the wheels in motion, with Wimmer’s script the first element. Of course, they’ll need Jolie to sign on, but Deadline reports that she’s interested, assuming the screenplay turns out to her satisfaction. And we’re guessing they’ll try to recruit director Philip Noyce again, but that will also likely have to wait until he sees the script…