Troll 2 is on the way at Netflix, with the original film’s director, Roar Uthaug, returning to make it. Expect big beards.
Troll, released last year, was a Norwegian monster movie about a ragtag group who united to fight the titular creature in the mountains. A mix of Scandinavian folklore and Hollywood-style set-pieces – like all self-respecting monsters, the 145-foot troll immediately made a beeline for the nearest population centre – it was essentially King Kong or Godzilla with unfeasibly large beards.
The film eventually became the most popular foreign film on Netflix, with a record-breaking 103 million views in its first 91 days.
Unsurprisingly, a sequel is one the way, with the same production team – director Roar Uthaug, screenwriter Espen Aukan and producers Espen Horn and Kristian Strand Sinkeru. No plot details have yet been released, though its producers have said “the sequel will “again [offer a spin] on a Norwegian fairy tale figure, played, directed and produced by Norwegians.”
Although he was born and studied in Norway, Roar Uthaug’s filmmaking style always had more than a hint of the American mainstream to it. His breakthrough movie, 2015’s The Wave, was a Norway-set disaster movie in the vein of Irwin Allen; not long after, Hollywood came calling, and Uthaug directed the 2018 videogame adaptation, Tomb Raider, starring Alicia Vikander.
Notices were somewhat mixed, but Tomb Raider did well enough that a sequel was greenlit in 2019 – only for the production to vanish into a development quagmire. (Ben Wheatley was announced as director that year; two years later, Misha Green was announced as his replacement; then the film writes expired in 2022, and the whole idea of a Vikander-led sequel collapsed.)
Uthaug had already agreed to work on what would become Troll while he was still working on Tomb Raider, which meant he not only sidestepped the purgatorial Tomb Raider sequel scenario, but also went on to make one of Netflix’s most-watched films. That’s a win-win.
Troll 2 will go into production in 2024, but the original movie is currently available to stream on Netflix.
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