Liam Neeson is not a man who wants to stay off of your movie screens for long, and he’s got roles and parts and cameos aplenty for quite some time. One of his biggest roles lately, at least in power and scale if not screentime, is that of Zeus in Clash of the Titans. Say what you will about the rest of the film- Neeson’s got some Kraken-releasing skills. In any event, Neeson expects to be stretching his immortal acting muscles again as soon as March when the sequel, Wrath of the Titans, will begin filming.
Clash of the Titans was a modest success here in the states, bringing in $163m from a $125m budget, while at the same time garnering fairly atrocious reviews, and a backlash against post-converted 3D that actually made its way into the mainstream. So widespread was the displeasure with that particular conversion, that Warner Brothers canceled the conversion for the latest Harry Potter film when it wasn’t up to snuff (not that it was a clear cut cause/effect situation, but it certainly affected their decision making). All of that aside, the film did gross nearly half-a-billion dollars worldwide, so there’s meat on the franchise’s bones.
Neeson calls the film a “revamping” and expects “kickass stuff, and a very human story” -though, he’s only read half of a script that is 10 drafts deep and not finished. That said, Warner Brothers is a much more reactive studio that many others, and a new director (Jonathan Liebesman of Battle: LA) could mean a radically different movie.
This information all comes from the Belfast Telegraph, which also mentions the November rumors that James Franco and Javier Bardem were in talks to play Agenor (son of Poseidon) and Ares respectively. That’s in reference to a Production Weekly Tweet that has since disappeared from what I can tell.
If I grant them anything, it’s that Wrath of the Titans is a pretty sharp title, and if Liebesman has stepped up his action game as much as the material for Battle: LA suggests he has, then we might see this series improve a little bit. And frankly, it’s always hard to root against what is a monster-movie at heart. Big monster-shaped smears of pixels aren’t enough though, so we’ll see what they get put together by march.