Soldado Producer Reaffirms Film’s Status As A Standalone Actioner

Production on Soldado is just now beginning to enter the homestretch, but there’s still much we don’t know about Stefano Sollima’s action follow-up. Benicio Del Toro (Alejandro) and Josh Brolin (Matt Graver) are back, back, back as the morally bankrupt law enforcers, but without Emily Blunt’s fierce rookie Kate Macer lining the cast sheet, the upcoming action-thriller isn’t considered to be a direct sequel to Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario.

Nor is it a prequel, according to producer Basil Iwanyk, who revealed to Collider that Soldado will release as a completely standalone experience, one that bears “no reference at all” to its critically acclaimed predecessor. That naturally lends Sollima and the writing team enough creative leeway to craft their own story, just don’t expect to learn whether the follow-up takes place before or after the events of Sicario.

Per Collider:

“You have no idea if it’s before or after [the events of Sicario], if it’s five years—you have no clue. There is no reference at all to the first Sicario, so you don’t know when it happens… Sicario, the world isn’t that specific. It’s just these characters. And frankly we wanted audiences to experience the characters in real-time rather than having an exposition dump saying, ’Meanwhile in Sicario’…”

With no Kate Macer to speak of, prepare to delve deeper into Josh Brolin and del Toro’s respective characters, with Iwanyk going on to tease a movie that is “just as disturbing, just as emotional” as the first.

“The script was amazing. Truly, I think you could argue that it was better than the first script. It’s a bigger movie; it is just as intense, just as disturbing, just as emotional. You’re going deeper into both Josh Brolin’s character and Benicio’s character, and I think people are going to be shocked by how relevant the movie is in this current environment, with our new president and what’s going on politically in that world.”

Featuring a script penned by Taylor Sheridan, Soldado is expected to deploy into theaters before the year’s end. Indeed, Sheridan and Co. have been toying with the idea of a potential third film in the series, one that would also adhere to the anthology format of Soldado.

Elsewhere in Iwanyk’s Collider chat, the producer turned in a status report on the Splinter Cell movie brewing at Ubisoft. It’ll reportedly shoot for a “hard PG-13,” and Iwanyk has stressed a need for the live-action spy thriller to distance itself from both its genre contemporaries (see: James Bond and Jason Bourne) and other video game adaptations.