Movies
Keep Your Lips Sealed, ‘Pontypool’ Sequel on the Way!
While I wasn’t a huge fan of the film (read my review from the 2008 Toronto Film Festival), the buzz behind Bruce McDonald’s Pontypool is extremely positive. While the lot of you wait to see the film later this month (IFC releases it in limited theaters and on VOD May 29th), acclaimed director Bruce McDonald is already prepping his return to the director’s chair with Pontypool Changes, a sequel to his highly anticipated psychological thriller that follows a small-town radio station DJ (Stephen McHattie) discovers that recent madness in the local population may be caused by a virus transmitted through speech, reports Twitch Film. Read on for the skinny.
From a press release posted by Twitch Film:
“Producer Jeffrey Coghlan confirmed rumors in Cannes today that the Pontypool sequel is scheduled to lens in early 2010, reuniting McDonald with Pontypool screenwriter Tony Burgess, who adapted the original from his book “Pontypool Changes Everything”.
Horror fan and blog sites are already buzzing and early reviews for Pontypool are calling the tensely intelligent thriller McDonald’s best film ever and one of the scariest films in years.
Pontypool, named after the small town in which it’s set, features veteran character actor Stephen McHattie, (Watchmen, 300, A History of Violence), as a cantankerous radio DJ trapped within the station’s walls as a deadly virus consumes the town, turning its citizens into cannibalistic zombie-like creatures. IFC In Theatres releases the film May 29th day and date on its VOD platform, which reaches more than 50 million homes in the US.
The early demand surprised Coghlan who said, “Fan and distributor reactions have been overwhelming, and the script for the sequel takes a whole new side to the story and really opens it up for more action, and more scares. It’s brilliant.”
Pontypool has it’s final marketplace screening in Cannes on Monday May 18 at 5:30 pm with worldwide sales being handled by Forward Motion Entertainment.”
Universal has been having a hell of a time getting their Universal Monsters brand back on a better path in the wake of the Dark Universe collapsing, with four movies thus far released in the years since The Mummy attempted to get that interconnected universe off the ground.
First was Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, to date the only post-Mummy hit for the Universal Monsters, followed by The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Renfield, and now Abigail. The latter three films have attempted to bring Dracula back to the screen in fresh ways, but both Demeter and Renfield severely underperformed at the box office. And while Abigail is a far better vampire movie than those two, it’s unfortunately also struggling to turn a profit.
Where does the Universal Monsters brand go from here? The good news is that Universal and Blumhouse have once again enlisted the help of Leigh Whannell for their upcoming Wolf Man reboot, which is howling its way into theaters in January 2025. This is good news, of course, because Whannell’s Invisible Man was the best – and certainly most profitable – of the post-Dark Universe movies that Universal has been able to conjure up. The film ended its worldwide run with $144 million back in 2020, a massive win considering the $7 million budget.
Given the film was such a success, you may wondering why The Invisible Man 2 hasn’t come along in these past four years. But the wait for that sequel may be coming to an end.
Speaking with the Happy Sad Confused podcast this week, The Invisible Man star Elisabeth Moss notes that she feels “very good” about the sequel’s development at this point in time.
“Blumhouse and my production company [Love & Squalor Pictures]… we are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” Moss updates this week. “And I feel very good about it.”
She adds, “We are very much intent on continuing that story.”
At the end of the 2020 movie, Elisabeth Moss’s heroine Cecilia Kass uses her stalker’s high-tech invisibility suit to kill him, now in possession of the technology that ruined her life.
Stay tuned for more on The Invisible Man 2 as we learn it.
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