Sylvester Stallone has never been one to shy away from making sequels to his most famous movies, and is still playing both Rocky Balboa and John Rambo well into his 70s, while the Escape Plan series has continued on home video and The Expendables 4 is reportedly in the works, too. He’s also toyed with the idea of follow-ups to some of his other biggest hits like Tango & Cash and Cliffhanger without ever getting them off the ground. But yesterday brought the news that one of his most popular outings will be next to get the long-awaited sequel treatment.
Earlier this week, Stallone announced that Demolition Man 2 was officially in the works, with the next adventure for man out of time John Spartan currently in the very early stages of development. The original didn’t fare particularly well with critics, but proved to be massively popular with fans of the action genre, with many of them struggling to contain their excitement over the news.
While there’s no plot details available as of yet, we’ve now heard from our sources – the same ones who told us an Extraction sequel is in the works and Now You See Me 3 is in development, both of which were correct – that the current plan is to have Wesley Snipes return to play bleach-blond villain Simon Phoenix.
Obviously, Snipes was frozen and then smashed into a thousand pieces at the end of Demolition Man, but according to our intel, the current plan is to go down the classic sci-fi route of cloning, with the main villain set to create a clone of Phoenix in order to present a familiar yet even more formidable challenge for our hero.
Beyond that, we can only speculate as to what may happen, but it’ll be interesting to see if the story picks up 30 years on from Demolition Man‘s initial 2032 setting, or they find a way to have Spartan frozen again and unleash him into an even more distant future. Hopefully it ends up being the latter, because the idea of a cranky septuagenarian getting thrown into a more advanced and unrecognizable society than the one he’d just gotten used to could turn out to be gold.
