Director Ron Howard and star Glen Powell are set to make a firefighting drama for Amazon MGM – though it isn’t thought to be a sequel to Howard’s Backdraft.
Ron Howard has endured a bit of a tricky period lately, with the filmmaker first having to deal with Amazon MGM sticking his underwater rescue movie Thirteen Lives straight onto streaming, despite getting strong early reviews. Then there’s his ‘steamy and violent thriller’, Eden, which couldn’t find a distributor for what felt like forever.
Howard even did an extended cameo in an episode of The Studio, where lots of executives were saying lovely things to him, and yet when push comes to shove, they were hellbent on undermining him.
Whether that was a case of art imitating life, who knows? What does seem clear is that things are looking up for the director of such beloved films as Apollo 13 and Rush. Eden now has a distributor and is set to release this year, and it seems that Howard has also cleared the air with Amazon MGM: the studio will be teaming with Howard to back an untitled firefighter drama starring Glen Powell. Given that Powell is involved, here’s hoping a theatrical release becomes more likely.
Podcast: Batman Returns (1992) and Backdraft (1991)
Amazon MGM recently announced that it’s spending a billion dollars on its 2026 slate, and that half of those films will be headed to cinemas. We’d imagine that this project will be one of them, although given how Howard and other noted filmmakers (such as Doug Liman) have faced issues in this area, we wouldn’t be betting any money on the outcome.
Christina Hodson has written the screenplay, having previously written The Flash and 2018’s Bumblebee, perhaps the best of the Transformers films to date. No word as to yet whether Howard’s fiery film will be filming soon and releasing as part of Amazon’s 2026 slate, but The InSneider does state that it isn’t a sequel to Howard’s fondly-remembered 1991 firefighting drama, Backdraft. Unless of course, it is, and everybody is just being coy; it was only a year ago that Glen Powell was linked to a Backdraft sequel. Could these projects be one and the same?
Sequel or not, we really don’t mind either way as long at some point, a couple of good-looking people hook up on top of a speeding fire engine.
We’ll bring you more as we hear it.
