With Unbreakable, Split and now Glass this year, M. Night Shyamalan has sort of accidentally created his own “cinematic universe,” which is interesting because his original plan for the three main characters was to simply feature all of them in Unbreakable. As Shyamalan reminds in a new chat with Vulture, early drafts of the script indeed featured “the Horde.”
“Originally Unbreakable and Split were together,” Shyamalan explained to the site. “David and the Horde bump into each other at the train station, and David follows him. It’s a narrative issue. Whenever you raise the stakes, you can’t unraise them. So once you introduce girls being abducted, there’s a ticking clock that doesn’t allow for the breadth of character development that I wanted to do in Unbreakable with David, his wife, and his kid.”
Instead, of course, Shyamalan excised the Horde from Unbreakable and gave Kevin Wendell Crumb his own movie with Split, and he’s now firmly tying the two together with Glass. So what’s next from this “cinematic universe,” if Glass performs well at the box office? According to what Shyamalan told the site, he’s not interested in milking the universe for all it’s worth.
“If Glass lands as big or bigger [than Split], there will be pressure on you to do another sequel,” the site noted. To which Shyamalan replied, “Yeah, we’re not doing that though.” He continued, “I have the sequel rights to most of my movies, essentially for the reason to not do them.”
“[A cinematic universe is] not interesting to me. There’s no danger in that. Or not enough danger, let’s say that,” Shyamalan elaborated. “For me, my weapon isn’t matching pyrotechnics against pyrotechnics. I’m just not good at it! I just can’t — Avengers and movies like that — I mean, I don’t even know how they do these things.”
Hero, villain and beast collide in Glass, opening January 18th.
