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.

There’s been talk of an “Unbreakable” sequel for a long time.
Yeah.

Samuel L. Jackson seems to want to do it. I saw you two talking on Twitter.
It’s a harder one for me because — it’s getting closer, by the way.

I feel like I’ve heard that for the past 10 years. I want that to be true.
I want it to happen, too… That’s when you start going, “Oh my God,” and you try to push that away. The same thing with “Unbreakable,” to some extent, it’s excitement to be made. “It’s such a fun thing” is squashing my ability to find the thing that’s connecting me with it. Does that make sense? So, I don’t feel like I did it for agenda reasons. So, slowly I’m getting a story in my head that I feel like is able to tell what I’m feeling right now.

For people who like that movie, it sounds encouraging.
Yeah, it is! The story of a guy who kind of wakes up with a little gray feeling in the morning, I love that character. It’s something that I feel and I want to talk more about that character.

Now, you can say what you want about Shyamalan – God knows I have, right in this article – but I will never stop wanting a sequel to Unbreakable. Firstly because I still think there are good stories in the idea of a guy who learns late in life that he has always had superpowers, and being pushed to find the limits of those powers. Ever since the original film came out, I have imagined a scene where Mr. Glass has hostages at the top of a skyscraper and has cut the wires for the elevators. He calls David Dunn and tells him that, if he wants the hostages released, he’ll have to fly up to the roof. Dunn says, “I can’t fly,” and Mr. Glass, in that Samuel L. Motherfucking Jackson voice, asks, “…have you tried?” Now, that’s all out of my own head, but I want to see shit like that.

But I also want a sequel because that movie is, in a very real sense, part of the reason that this Web site exists. I saw Unbreakable in its original theatrical release (when it was marketed as a simple thriller in the vein of The Sixth Sense, and not a superhero story at all), after years of reading only Vertigo comics, having become dissatisfied with superhero comics from the Big Two a few years before (hi, Death of Superman, Spider Clone Saga and everything Todd McFarlane ever wrote that was longer than his own name!). And Unbreakable reminded me just how much I loved superhero comics in my teens, which in turn, led me to go to my local comic store, where, at the time, they had no idea who I was and asked me to buy something or get the fuck out, and pick up some superhero books.

And those books included Grant Morrison’s Marvel Boy, Warren Ellis’s The Authority, Kevin Smith’s and Joe Quesada’s Daredevil, and J. Michael Straczynski’s Rising Stars… and that was it: I was once again hooked through the bag and back again like a seven-year-old with an unlimited comics budget.

Thirteen years, about 40 longboxes and eight San Diego Comic-Cons later (with another Comic-Con coming up!), here we are: with a little, mom-and-pop Web site where I get to talk comics with the world every day. And while we’re still tiny, and there are days when I think it’s obvious that life is getting in the way and we’re only posting something to make sure we don’t get in the habit of skipping a day so we’re limbered up to write when there’s something really cool to talk about, I’m proud of what we’ve done here, as small in scope as it is.

So there we are: 1,000 posts down… and hopefully a few thousand more to go. Thanks for hanging in with us.

(Unbreakable stuff via Bleeding Cool)