Jake Gyllenhaal’s UFC fighter turned bouncer will be returning in Road House 2, with Guy Ritchie taking on director duties.
Amazon Studios’ Road House remake made a splash when it arrived last year. The Jake Gyllenhaal action flick became Prime Video’s most-watched debut ever worldwide, with almost 100 million views.
Road House was also noteworthy for its behind the scenes drama, most of it coming from the film’s director, Doug Liman who loudly and repeatedly rubbished the studio for (he claims) reneging on a deal to put the film into cinemas. Instead, it made that impressive debut straight onto streaming.
Doug Liman – you probably won’t be surprised to learn – isn’t returning to direct Road House 2.
In his place, (states The Hollywood Reporter) Guy Ritchie has been drafted in to direct the sequel with Bad Boys: Ride Or Die’s Will Beall penning the script.
Jake Gyllenhaal will return as Dalton, the ex-UFC fighter turned barroom brawler, and we can only hope that a second film will at least finally see him spouting philosophy from a hospital bed as the late, great Patrick Swayze did in the immortal 1987 original.
Read more: Road House review | Jake Gyllenhaal is the standout in a boisterous remake
We learned around a year ago that Gyllenhaal would be returning for a sequel, with Amazon quickly capitalising on those high viewing numbers. Clearly, the search for the right director has taken some time – likely because an appealing script needed to be hammered into shape – but it seems that all is now in place, even if we still don’t know just when production will begin.
We can take a guess that Conor McGregor won’t be returning though, given that the his mounting legal woes and increasingly negative public image has ended his fledgling film career before it ever really began.
Following Amazon MGM’s public fallout with Doug Liman, Guy Ritchie is more of a ‘safe pair of hands’ who has collaborated with the studio before on the spy action caper The Ministry Of Ungentlemanly Warfare. That film skipped cinemas and went to straight to streaming in the UK.
Ritchie is in the midst of a prolific spell right now, putting out project after project in quick succession, including two movies in postproduction, Wife And Dog and In The Grey. He also has Fountain Of Youth, starring John Krasinski and Natalie Portman, releasing via Apple later this year.
We’ll bring you more on the new Road House sequel as we hear it, but in the meantime, if you’d like to find out some of the secrets behind the first film’s bone-crunching action sequences, step right this way.
