Unexpected Milestones: Unbreakable 2 News, And Our 1,000th Post

This one’s about a bit of an obscure subject, considering that it concerns genre director M. Night Shyamalan, about whom the joke is now either, “The twist is that it turned out he sucked all along,” or perhaps, “I see dead careers,” if you’ve had a few drinks and you’re feeling mean… which I often am.

But I am going to indulge myself a little bit today, for the reasons that this very article constitutes Crisis On Infinite Midlives’s 1,000th post since our founding in September, 2011, and because Shyamalan’s 2000 movie Unbreakable is a movie with great personal significance to me, by reporting that Shyamalan is once again claiming that he might have a sequel or two to that movie in the works.

First, the facts: Shyamalan is doing publicity for the upcoming film After Earth, a movie about which, as was ably reported by Fox News’s Andy Levy on Twitter, Columbia Pictures has done yeoman’s work in not telling people Shyamalan directed it. And in the course of this press junket, Shyamalan (note to self: it’s “Shya,” like Shia LeBeouf only with a “y,” and then “malan.” Remember that and maybe you can type the guy’s name instead of pasting it over and over again) is consistently asked about the long-rumored sequel to Unbreakable, since asking after a sequel to Lady In The Water would be like asking the poor bastard if he has another suppurating chancre popping up in an uncomfortable place.

For years Shyamalan (Got it! And I didn’t have to backspace or nothing!) has teased that Unbreakable was actually just the first act of his original three-act screenplay, and that sequels might be coming. However, back in 2010, when Shyamalan was hyping The Night Chronicles – a series of urban horror movies that started with 2010’s Devil and then, well, kinda hasn’t gone anywhere beyond promises that the second will start shooting someday soon – he said that he had cannibalized the plot to one of the Unbreakable sequels for one of those horror flicks.

So that seemed like the end of that… but that was 2010, when the tone of the “What the fuck was that?” that people uttered leaving Shyamalan’s movies was still more impressed excitement than befuddled disappointment. With his last couple of movies being apparently work-for-hire projects servicing franchises or a megastar’s dream of his child’s movie stardom, Shyamalan’s tune about a second Unbreakable has changed a little bit.