Liam Neeson will return for the icy vehicular thriller sequel, The Ice Road 2: Road To The Sky, and filming is set to begin in Australia shortly.
Released in 2021, The Ice Road wasn’t necessarily the best entry in Liam Neeson’s action-thriller phase, but it did feature Laurence Fishburne as a character named Jim Goldenrod, which is one of those things we remember in idle moments from time to time.
About a group of truckers who set off down a frozen highway in the hope of rescuing workers from a collapsed diamond mine, The Ice Road received middling reviews, but was evidently a success for the companies that streamed it – the film was hosted by Netflix in the US and Amazon Prime in the UK.
It was so successful, in fact, that the sequel was hungrily snapped up at 2023’s Cannes Film Festival by Amazon Prime – that purchase was said to be worth $17m, making it the biggest deal of the entire festival.
Variety now reports that production on The Ice Road 2: Road To The Sky is about to get underway, with filming set to begin this month (that’s January 2024 if you’re reading this in the future) on locations in Walhalla, Australia. Virtual production facilities in Melbourne will also be used to film certain sequences using one of those new-fangled volume stages, as seen in The Mandalorian.
Writer-director Jonathan Hensleigh is returning to make the sequel, Neeson’s reprising his role as the taciturn trucker Mike, and the plot will take place in Nepal. There, Mike will make a solemn pilgrimage to Mount Everest (anyone who’s seen the first film will know why), only to encounter a group of deadly mercenaries while riding along on a tour bus.
“Mike and his mountain guide encounter a group of Nepalese mercenaries and must fight not only to save themselves and the busload of innocent travellers,” a description over at Deadline reads, “but also the local villagers’ homeland.”
Unfortunately, we have yet to learn whether Skeeter, the pet rat that was pivotal to the events of The Ice Road, will reprise his role. We’ll bring you more on this as it develops.
