You can’t help but be impressed with the Alita: Battle Angel fanbase, who continue their relentless campaign to see further adventures set in the cyberpunk future brought to vivid life by Robert Rodriguez and James Cameron in last year’s sci-fi blockbuster. The project spent decades in development hell before finally being steered out, but when the movie arrived in theaters, it didn’t pull in the sort of numbers required to launch a multi-film franchise.
$405 million is hardly a disaster, but with a budget rumored to be close to $200 million before additional marketing and promotional costs are factored in, if Alita managed to turn a profit at all, then the margins would have been razor thin. That hasn’t dissuaded the fans, though, and they’ve mobilized in a variety of different ways in an effort to try and get their point across, the most recent of which saw an online bombardment result in the movie being released back into theaters.
Rodriguez himself celebrated the news by debuting a brand new poster, but when Alita returned to the big screen, it only managed to reach twelfth place at the domestic box office after earning just $128,000, putting it one spot behind The New Mutants in the X-Men spinoff’s eleventh week of release. That sums up Alita: Battle Angel in a microcosm; the fans are incredibly dedicated to the cause, but there just doesn’t seem to be enough of them.
However, insider Grace Randolph is now claiming that there’s been talk behind the scenes at Disney about continuing the franchise with either a feature-length sequel or a Disney Plus series. With the studio set to make streaming their number one priority moving forward, the small screen certainly seems like the best bet for Alita: Battle Angel to get a second lease of life. But for now, we’ll just have to wait and see which direction they head in.
