Movies
Sequel To ‘The Raid: Redemption’, ‘Berendal’, Officially Announced
We continue to reserve the right to cover Gareth Evans’ The Raid on the grounds that it is indeed bloody. and disgusting (read our review). And soon we’ll be covering the sequel, Berendal. We’ve known The Raid was intended as the start of a trilogy for a while, now the realization of that plan is coming to fruition.
Per The Hollywood Reporter, “In a long-rumored move among the action movie set, director Gareth Evans is officially making a sequel to his upcoming film The Raid. Following successful runs at the 2011 Toronto Film Festival and the 2012 Sundance Festival, XYZ Films and Evans’ PT Merantu company brokered a deal to create a follow-up that will reunite the filmmaker with his Raid leading man Iko Uwais. Although Sony didn’t divulge plot details for the sequel, it follows the events of the first film, in which an Indonesian SWAT team gets trapped in a Jakarta slum and its members are forced to fight their way out. Tentatively titled Berandal, the sequel will have a “significantly larger” budget than its predecessor, and its shooting schedule is to include approximately 100 days of physical production.”
According to Evans, this is the story he wanted to tell originally anyway (which makes it the best kind of sequel), “the sequel idea came up while I was still writing ‘The Raid’, the first one. What happened is we tried to get the budget in place for a film called ‘Berendal’ first, and we spent a year and a half doing that. And in the process of trying to get the money for that film, we’d already designed the choreography, we’d already written the script, and we were already to go and we just needed the money in order to pull the trigger on it. And that’s a year and a half of not getting any closer to getting the money. We were in a position where we just decided, you know what, f*ck it, we’re not going to get it, we have to do something else with a lower budget. So ‘The Raid’ became that plan B project.”
The Raid: Redemption opens on March 23rd.
Universal has been having a hell of a time getting their Universal Monsters brand back on a better path in the wake of the Dark Universe collapsing, with four movies thus far released in the years since The Mummy attempted to get that interconnected universe off the ground.
First was Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, to date the only post-Mummy hit for the Universal Monsters, followed by The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Renfield, and now Abigail. The latter three films have attempted to bring Dracula back to the screen in fresh ways, but both Demeter and Renfield severely underperformed at the box office. And while Abigail is a far better vampire movie than those two, it’s unfortunately also struggling to turn a profit.
Where does the Universal Monsters brand go from here? The good news is that Universal and Blumhouse have once again enlisted the help of Leigh Whannell for their upcoming Wolf Man reboot, which is howling its way into theaters in January 2025. This is good news, of course, because Whannell’s Invisible Man was the best – and certainly most profitable – of the post-Dark Universe movies that Universal has been able to conjure up. The film ended its worldwide run with $144 million back in 2020, a massive win considering the $7 million budget.
Given the film was such a success, you may wondering why The Invisible Man 2 hasn’t come along in these past four years. But the wait for that sequel may be coming to an end.
Speaking with the Happy Sad Confused podcast this week, The Invisible Man star Elisabeth Moss notes that she feels “very good” about the sequel’s development at this point in time.
“Blumhouse and my production company [Love & Squalor Pictures]… we are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” Moss updates this week. “And I feel very good about it.”
She adds, “We are very much intent on continuing that story.”
At the end of the 2020 movie, Elisabeth Moss’s heroine Cecilia Kass uses her stalker’s high-tech invisibility suit to kill him, now in possession of the technology that ruined her life.
Stay tuned for more on The Invisible Man 2 as we learn it.
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