Earlier, ComingSoon.net had a chance to sit down in Toronto with Basil Iwanyk, producer of Ben Affleck’s new crime-drama The Town, out on September 17, and we asked him about the planned sequels to two of his big hits for 2010, Clash of the Titans and Sylvester Stallone’s The Expendables.
“‘Clash of the Titans 2’ will go February 1st in the UK. Jonathan Liebesman, who just did this movie ‘Battle: Los Angeles’, is directing it. We’re on early prep on that. It’s a huge movie and we want to do a much better job on it,” he told us. “Listen, we’re prideful people and we want to win and the 3D really helped us in a lot of ways, but we also took a lot of heat for it. I think for my own career and my own sense of purpose, I want this movie to rock and it will.”
One of the questions many people will have is who may be returning, since they introduced a fairly large band of men around Sam Worthington’s Perseus, who (spoilers!) were mostly killed off. He confirmed the return of Ralph Fiennes and Liam Neeson as Hades and Zeus respectively and that there were three key new roles. “Some of the Gods are (back),” he confirmed. “Sam’s back, Gemma Arterton, Ralph and Liam’s back, but we have a whole new group of people. I think we learned a lot from the tone of the first one, whether or not it got too serious or got too jokey, and it’s a really cool group of guys and three new big roles that I think will be movie stars, and we have high expectations for it, we really really do. The design work looks great and it’s going to be a whole different set of muscles to be flexed than ‘The Town.'”
We also wondered whether they would be able to top the movie in terms of some of the crazy locations they filmed in order to create a mythological world. “That’s something that we’re very proud of, and at this point, we’re thinking right now, ‘Where do we go that’s just as insane and crazy and cool?’ Not for a month but even for a week to capture like we did in Ethiopia on the first one, but yeah, it’s going to be a big and sprawling, the same kind of vibe.”
When questioned as to what Sylvester Stallone may have planned for the sequel to the surprise summer hit The Expendables (which will probably be Lionsgate’s second highest-grossing movie of all time very soon), we got a minor update. “I saw Avi Lerner this morning, who deserves all the credit for it,” Iwanyk responded. “He really went on the line for the movie. He told me, ‘We’re doing a sequel, we’re doing it right away.’ I haven’t talked to Sly at all about what’s going to happen in the sequel. It’s going to rock and you can just imagine in your head who will be in that cast in addition to the people who are there now. But I’m not sure. There’s a lot of excitement and I know that Avi and Sly want to go at it as soon as possible.”
“The thing about ‘The Expendables’ for us was that it was a movie we had at Warner Bros., and it was a dead project,” he said about the background for the hit action film. “We had a lunch with Sly’s agent and he said, ‘Sly needs to go to work,’ so we sent him and he turned it into ‘The Expendables.”
Look for more with Basil Iwanyk, talking about Ben Affleck’s The Town, sometime next week.
