It’s less than six weeks since M. Night Shyamalan‘s Old hit theaters, where it topped the box office in its first weekend, but the filmmaker is already hard at work on his next screenplay. His most recent effort scored mixed reviews, currently sitting on a bang average Rotten Tomatoes score of 50%, but having earned close to $85 million at the box office on an $18 million budget, it can’t be called anything other than a pandemic-era smash hit.
Ever since The Sixth Sense shot Shyamalan from his status as a relative unknown to being labeled cinema’s latest wunderkind, his creativity has always tended to come in fits and starts. His next three features arrived within five years of Haley Joel Osment seeing dead people, but since the release of Glass in January 2017, we’ve only seen Unbreakable crossover Glass and now Old in the last half a decade.
However, Shyamalan recently took to social media and revealed that he’s already on the third draft of his next project, one that’s shaping up to be a lean and mean effort given the current script is under 100 pages, as you can see below.
Glass and Old didn’t garner the same critical enthusiasm that greeted The Visit and Split, but it’d be an understatement to say that Shyamalan’s output has been plagued by inconsistency for a long time. Having rebounded from the disastrous double whammy of The Last Airbender and After Earth, he’s still got a long way to go in order to convince everybody that he’s back in a big way, but the 51 year-old is nothing if not creative enough to make it happen.