Ric Roman Waugh has been chatting about his Cliffhanger sequel and unsurprisingly, Top Gun: Maverick gets a mention.
News dropped at the beginning of this month that we’d be getting a follow-up film to 1993’s Cliffhanger, the Sylvester Stallone title that tends to be one of the less celebrated films from that 90s crop of action movies, even though it boasts some truly amazing moments. Sylvester Stallone will of course be returning, with Angel Has Fallen director Ric Roman Waugh filling the director’s chair.
Waugh has been chatting about the project to Screenrant, offering his thoughts on where he wants the sequel to go, whilst also offering a few small plot details too.
“I’m going to do the next evolution of Cliffhanger with Stallone, and watch his character evolve forward, and he has a daughter now who’s a mountaineering climber, as well, and all hell breaks loose in the Italian Alps, and here we go”, said Waugh.
Waugh cited a couple of other legacy sequels as influences, including one of Stallone’s other franchises and of course, Top Gun: Maverick: “But it’s the evolution of [Cliffhanger] the way Top Gun: Maverick carried forward the story of the original movie, how Creed became the evolution of a franchise of Rocky into something new … That’s kind of what we’re after on Cliffhanger, so that’s fun, it’s fun to be part of a new fresh start, or the evolution of something like that. But, one is a continuation of a story that means a lot to me, and the other one is going to be fun to hopefully evolve something in a really cool and meaningful way.”
Both of the series that Waugh mentions were little more than bombastic, pro-American action flicks during their 1980s heydays. (To be clear, they were very fun bombastic, pro-American action flicks.) However, both Top Gun and the evolving Rocky series found ways to add an extra dimension to their storytelling in the last decade, adding a real dash of heart to proceedings, navigating the path of doing legacy sequels the right way.
Could Cliffhanger 2 follow this path? Anything’s possible and Waugh himself has successfully walked the line between action and drama with films like 2020’s Greenland. Time will tell which direction the project moves in but we’re intrigued to see how it all plays out.
—
Thank you for visiting! If you’d like to support our attempts to make a non-clickbaity movie website:
Follow Film Stories on Twitter here, and on Facebook here.
Buy our Film Stories and Film Junior print magazines here.
Become a Patron here.
