James McAvoy’s Split Character Was Originally Created For Unbreakable

This January sees the release of Glass, the finale of a superhero movie trilogy that’s taken nearly 20 years to unfold. Back in 2000’s Unbreakable, Bruce Willis played super-powered everyman David Dunn who – spoilers – discovers his friend Elijah Price AKA Mr. Glass (Samuel L. Jackson) is, in comic book terms, his nemesis. Dunn then reappeared in 2017’s Split, revealing that the horror pic starring James McAvoy as Kevin Wendell Crumb AKA The Horde, a man with dozens of personalities, was actually a secret sequel.

Though Dunn only shows up in Split‘s final moments, this wasn’t a late-in-the-day decision by director M. Night Shyamalan to tie his two films together. In fact, he originally created The Horde to appear in Unbreakable many years earlier. Crumb would’ve been the home invader Dunn stops near the end of the movie. However, Shyamalan took him out of the story as he realized he needed to streamline it.

“Originally Unbreakable and Split were together,” said the director. “David and the Horde bump into each other at the train station, and David follows him. It’s a narrative issue. Whenever you raise the stakes, you can’t un-raise them. So once you introduce girls being abducted, there’s a ticking clock that doesn’t allow for the breadth of character development that I wanted to do in Unbreakable with David, his wife, and his kid.”

Longtime followers of Shyamalan will remember that he’s been talking about Unbreakable being the start of a potential trilogy since it first came out. It took long enough, but finally he’s achieved his goal, with Glass operating as the third installment of the narrative continued in Split, bringing together Willis’ Dunn, Jackson’s Price and McAvoy’s Crumb for one big showdown. Well, we say that, but this being Shyamalan, fans should expect a psychological thriller rather than a Marvel-esque action-packed rollercoaster.

Anyways, the first reviews for Glass arrived this week and unfortunately, critics seem, well, split on the movie’s worth. Some say it’s a huge disappointment, while others say it’s a solid closer to Shyamalan’s Unbreakable trilogy. Looks like fans will just have to decide for themselves when it hits theaters on January 18th.