Alita: Battle Angel eventually proved to be a sleeper hit. It had a rather underwhelming domestic opening weekend back in February, but ultimately found its feet in the international market, where it made $319 million of its $405 million box office total. This doesn’t exactly make the film a smash hit, but it eventually doubled its $200 million budget. Will we ever see an Alita 2 on the horizon, though?
Fans of the first film are certainly game. Dubbing themselves “The Alita Army,” they’ve created a petition that currently has 121,000 signatures. One wrinkle in this though is that Alita: Battle Angel was released by 20th Century Fox just before the Disney acquisition. This means that Disney now own the rights to the movie and would have to greenlight any possible sequel. But a big factor working in the film’s favor is having James Cameron firmly involved. Despite being tied up for the next few years with Avatar sequels, the director still has a lot of sway, especially as we’ll see an Avatar film almost every year from 2021 – 2025.
So, what can the fans do? Here’s what producer Jon Landau says:
“What I think the Alita Army should do is keep peppering our family now at Disney and [let them know] how important it is to have another Alita movie and hopefully we’ll venture there one day.”
But if it were to happen one day, it could be quite a way off, according to the producer:
“I think when you can talk about any movie, and I won’t talk specifically about Alita, but your first step is writing a script. You’ve got to assume that’s going to take you 12 to 18 months to write a script. Assuming that script is great, you then have a six to 10 month pre-production. You then have a six month shoot. You then have a year of post-production and that’s just any movie of this ilk.”
Some of the work may have already been done, though. Cameron had been developing Alita: Battle Angel for nearly 20 years before it was released, and over that time, he’d already drawn up sequel plans.
When Jim [Cameron] was going to direct us, which he was at on point, in his mind he had plotted out two additional stories of where we would go very specifically.
So, with Landau up for it, Robert Rodriguez happy to return for a sequel and star Rosa Salazar on board – let’s make this happen! Personally, I thought Alita: Battle Angel was a deeply underrated movie that was squeezed out of the domestic market by Captain Marvel. I was really happy to see it eventually find an appreciative audience though and now, I’m left wanting more insane cyborg action.
