Veteran producer Jon Landau has been reminiscing about the 2019 manga adaptation, Alita: Battle Angel – and reckons Disney could be persuaded to make a sequel.
Some films – apparently at random – seem destined to make a far bigger splash once they’ve been out of cinemas for a few years. Alita: Battle Angel, the 2019 sci-fi action flick directed by Robert Rodriguez from James Cameron and Laeta Kalogridis’ script, is certainly one of them.
Though at the time it made a reasonably healthy $405m at the box office, in the years since the adaptation of Yukito Kishiro’s manga has grown a sizeable cult following. As an original, action-heavy sci-fi flick, it’s an increasingly rare beast. Like Oblivion and Edge Of Tomorrow before it, the 2010s might not have been inundated with blockbuster zippy-shooty action – but the gift of hindsight shows there’s a fair few gems that fall into the “just about made its money back” bracket.
In a recent interview with Screen Rant, then, Alita producer Jon Landau seems unsurprisingly optimistic about their chances of getting a sequel off the ground. With James Cameron apparently still keen to revisit that universe, and Disney having since bought out the 20th Century Fox back catalogue, an eventual follow-up (probably after the producing pair are done with their Avatar sequels) seems likely. Cameron’s last two movies have made more than $5bn between them after all, so we’re sure Disney will let him do whatever he likes afterwards.
“I’m very proud of that film,” Landua said of Alita, “and we were doing it concurrently with Avatar. I was down with Robert on the set doing all that, and Jim was involved too and saw it. It came on HBO one night, and Jim watched it and called me after he watched it. He said, “Jon, Alita was on, I just decided to watch it. It’s a good movie.” (laughs) And it is! So, I want to be able to definitely do more in that world.”
Fingers crossed, then, that a sequel makes it over the line. Or maybe James Cameron will just make Avatar films forever. At this rate, both seem pretty likely.
