It feels like a lifetime ago that Vin Diesel said the Coronavirus pandemic wouldn’t stop him from traveling to China to promote the impending release of his comic book adaptation Bloodshot, which obviously didn’t happen. The movie arrived just as the theatrical industry fell into disarray, and ended up as one of the first major titles to get sent to VOD almost immediately, becoming available just two weeks after it hit the big screen.
As a result, Bloodshot bombed and wound up leaving cinemas with only $37 million in the coffers, which wasn’t a bad return given the circumstances, especially when it was produced for a relatively thrifty $45 million. However, one downside is that it looked as though the proposed Valiant Cinematic Universe had become the latest shared mythology to fall at the first hurdle, with reports making the rounds that the property could end up getting rebooted with a new actor in the lead.
In a surprising turn of events, though, Bloodshot ended up being hugely popular on digital, ranking as one of the best-selling movies for weeks, and must have pulled in a decent amount of money because it was announced last month that the chrome-domed action hero would be returning for a sequel. We haven’t heard anything more since then, although Diesel has now taken to social media to tease a major update coming soon, but he refrains from saying what it is.
Bloodshot was like a comic book movie straight out of the 1990s, in terms of both the story and quality of the visual effects, and while it remains hard to gauge how it would have performed if it had enjoyed a standard theatrical run, the numbers were clearly there to make a second outing a worthwhile investment.
