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.
Movies
‘Abigail’ on Track for a Better Opening Weekend Than Universal’s Previous Two Vampire Attempts
In the wake of Leigh Whannell’s Invisible Man back in 2020, Universal has been struggling to achieve further box office success with their Universal Monsters brand. Even in the early days of the pandemic, Invisible Man scared up $144 million at the worldwide box office, while last year’s Universal Monsters: Dracula movies The Last Voyage of the Demeter and Renfield didn’t even approach that number when you COMBINE their individual box office hauls.
The horror-comedy Renfield came along first in April 2023, ending its run with just $26 million. The period piece Last Voyage of the Demeter ended its own run with a mere $21 million.
But Universal is trying again with their ballerina vampire movie Abigail this weekend, the latest bloodbath directed by the filmmakers known as Radio Silence (Ready or Not, Scream).
Unlike Demeter and Renfield, the early reviews for Abigail are incredibly strong, with our own Meagan Navarro calling the film “savagely inventive in terms of its vampiric gore,” ultimately “offering a thrill ride with sharp, pointy teeth.” Read her full review here.
That early buzz – coupled with some excellent trailers – should drive Abigail to moderate box office success, the film already scaring up $1 million in Thursday previews last night. Variety notes that Abigail is currently on track to enjoy a $12 million – $15 million opening weekend, which would smash Renfield ($8 million) and Demeter’s ($6 million) opening weekends.
Working to Abigail‘s advantage is the film’s reported $28 million production budget, making it a more affordable box office bet for Universal than the two aforementioned movies.
Stay tuned for more box office reporting in the coming days.
In Abigail, “After a group of would-be criminals kidnap the 12-year-old ballerina daughter of a powerful underworld figure, all they have to do to collect a $50 million ransom is watch the girl overnight. In an isolated mansion, the captors start to dwindle, one by one, and they discover, to their mounting horror, that they’re locked inside with no normal little girl.”
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