When The Meg was released in 2018 it was as successful as you’d expect a movie about Jason Statham battling a giant shark to be, and a sequel was announced a mere two months later. Now, the director of The Meg 2, Ben Wheatley, has hinted that it’ll be even more action-packed.
The first outing saw diver Jonas Taylor (Statham) hired to lead a rescue of the crew of a stricken submarine attacked by a giant shark, only for the creature to follow them back to the surface and wreak havoc. It was loosely adapted from Steve Alten’s novel of the same name, in the process turning the sub-Michael Crichton writing into something far more cinematic that somehow still managed to take itself a little too seriously in spite of its elaborate shark attack sequences.
Wheatley had this to say about how his vision for the new movie will compare to the original:
“It’s an opportunity to do action on such an insanely large scale that it’s just unbelievable. From doing Free Fire, which was all my Christmases came at once in terms of action, this is just unbelievable. And just doing the storyboards for it, just thinking, ‘Oh,’ it’s just… I feel a heavy responsibility for it, to make sure that it kind of delivers [for] all the big shark fans out there.”
The follow-up’s reported subtitle of The Trench, the same as that of the second in Alten’s currently seven-book series, suggests that it’ll take inspiration from the novel. In it, Taylor is forced by circumstance to venture back into the Marianas Trench and discovers that the megalodon isn’t the only prehistoric horror lurking in its blackened depths, encountering similarly voracious predator the Kronosaurus, meaning the scale to which Wheatley refers may well be a face-off between the two aquatic monstrosities.
For all The Meg’s financial accomplishments, it was a somewhat perfunctory film, and despite its multinational cast, the pandering to the Chinese market was more than a little blatant. Hopefully Wheatley’s reliable talent for crafting inventive visuals from the most basic of material will allow The Meg 2 to become a far more distinctive experience.