Now in theaters everywhere is Life (read Trace’s review), which stars Ryan Reynolds, Jake Gyllenhaal and Rebecca Ferguson in a battle against an intelligent extraterrestrial organism.
The hotter than ever writing duo of Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick penned the screenplay, which sets the stage for a continuation to the film. Be warned, there are spoilers that follow.
The film does end with an escape pod crashing to Earth, acknowledging that Calvin, whom can reproduce, is still alive.
“We always wanted it to end in a creepy fashion that set up at least the possibility for future movies and but the script is very much a seesaw between Calvin having an advantage and the astronauts having an advantage,” the duo told THR. “We always wanted them to be smart, but then a new problem present itself so when they got out of the frying pan they found themselves in the fire. And it just so happened that the last twist was that despite all their best intentions, Calvin was once again once step ahead of them at the end of the movie. It was very intentional and we just wanted to leave people with a real sense of goose bumps and anticipation of what might happen next.”
Explaining that they “would love to be involved” in a Life sequel, Reese suggests a followup would be akin to James Cameron’s Aliens, where it’s a much bigger world compared to the contained world of the first Alien.
“Completely,” Reese said when asked about the ‘Alien’ to ‘Aliens’ transition/similarities. “Just the fact that Calvin can now possibly reproduce, I think, is an interesting idea. We’ve dropped him in a situation that is teaming with life to hunt and to eat. That being the ocean, or the coast of Indonesia or Vietnam or wherever we are saying he’s landed. So that opens it up right there. But just the idea of firewalls could extend to Earth in the sense that now they’ve failed to contain Calvin to the station. The question is, how would the Earth react? Obviously, this was an international effort, so there are a lot of countries cooperating. And again, they would be trying to contain this thing from moving forward and yet there might be more Calvins to deal with. To us, that screams interesting sequel.”
While the film leaves the door wide open to a sequel, the numbers just arent there right now. Columbia Pictures’ film opened to a weak $12 million here in the States, although it did grasp another $16 million overseas. The reported budget pegs it around $58 million (plus marketing costs), which means the film would need to pull in $200-250 million worldwide in order to break even. While Calvin may be adapting to Earth, I don’t think we’ll ever learn the continuation of the story…
