His involvement with Night Watch 3-quel in serious doubt
Russian filmmaker Timur Bekmambetov is about to explode in Hollywood with his jaw-dropping action movie Wanted, based on the graphic novel by Mark Millar and J.G. Jones, but most horror fans will already know his work from his two previous action-horror films Night Watch (Nochnoi Dozor) and its sequel Day Watch (Dnevnoi Dozor).
Cult classics in the United States but huge moneymaking blockbusters in Russia, the movies based on a trilogy of popular sci-fi novels by Sergei Lukyanenko, were given limited releases in the United States by Fox Searchlight and only did minimal theatrical business, mainly finding their audience on DVD among fans of the film’s complicated battle between two factions of ancient superbeings, including a group of vampiric baddies.
Way back in 2005, when the filmmaker was in New York promoting the first movie Night Watch at the Tribeca Film Festival, the plan was to make three movies, having just finished filming the second one Day Watch with plans to doing a third one in English called Twilight Watch (alternatively known as Dusk Watch). Those plans were sidelined somewhat when Bekmambetov was hired to direct Wanted and while doing a panel for the movie at New York Comic Con two months ago, Bekmambetov told the audience that he considered Wanted to be “his ‘Dusk Watch’ for now,” when he decided to direct the Universal action film instead of concluding the series.
Now that he’s finished with Wanted, ShockTillYouDrop.com asked him whether he’s changed his mind, because there’s certainly been a number of rumors circulating lately, including this Russian blog, that seems to know more about the movie than Bekmambetov himself.
“I don’t know. It depends on what will happen,” Bekmambetov told us in this exclusive interview when asked about his involvement with a third movie in the series. “I never read a script for ‘Dusk Watch’ and we’ll see what will happen. I’m kind of done with these kinds of movies. Not action movies, but conspiracy theory/action/tragedies.”
The plan was always to do the movie in English with the films’ original star Konstantin Khabensky reprising his roleâthe Russian actor has a great role in Wanted incidentally–but Bekmambetov claimed that he hadn’t heard anything about American screenwriters working on an English screenplay. It’s somewhat surprising to think that the man who was pivotal at making the two previous movies such huge hits in his native country might not be involved or even aware of what’s going on, but it may be that he’s waiting to see what happens with Wanted and its potential sequel before speaking about his future plans.
Or maybe the Russian director just feels that Day Watch ended in a good place to finish the story he originally wanted to tell. “I don’t know what I can add,” he admitted. “I mean, yeah, I think ‘Wanted’ is a good step for me.”
Of course, there probably won’t be any word whether Universal moves forward with the sequel to that action movie until after opening weekend, so it served little purpose to ask whether Timur might be on board, but he does have some ideas how they can do another one, which you can learn more about in our full interview with Bekmambetov over on SuperheroHype.com later this week. Wanted opens on Friday, June 27.
Source: Edward Douglas
