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.