A year ago, Sylvester Stallone confirmed that he was “working on” Demolition Man 2 with Warner Bros. and that it was “looking fantastic.” The 1993 movie is an excellent sci-fi actioner, centring around a renegade cop named John Spartan being cryogenically frozen in the dark crime-ridden future of 1996. The majority of the film takes place after he’s defrosted in 2032, where he awakens into a utopian neo-California that has abandoned violence, swearing and eating meat.
So, what do we want from a sequel? Well, the original’s ultra-liberal, socially distanced 2030s has become weirdly prescient, so the main attraction is seeing what crazy world they’d come up with next. A fun idea could be to repeat the same basic premise but in reverse. Meaning we would have an aged John somehow ending up a fish out of water in another bizarre world. After so long living in a calm, peaceful universe, Stallone’s character may have gotten soft and perhaps if he found himself thrust into a post-apocalyptic timeline full of violence and explosions, he’d have to restore his ass-kicking mojo to save the day.
Then again, that plot would likely mean ditching the supporting cast. So far, there’s no indication that Sandra Bullock is reprising her role as Lieutenant Lenina Huxley, though it’s clear from interviews that she has fond memories of the movie. Other returning stars may include Denis Leary as rat-munchin’ libertarian antihero Edgar Friendly, and it’d be fun to see how his politics affected the world after the events of the first film.
It’s perhaps unlikely that Wesley Snipes’ Simon Phoenix is returning given that he exploded into a million icy pieces, but this is sci-fi we’re talking about, so clones, robotic doubles, and alternate dimensions may all theoretically be on the table. I’m always down for more Snipes, too, and we know he can still bring that famous charisma to the screen.
The only real question is when Demolition Man 2 is coming, as since Stallone’s announcement, there’s been no news. It seems the action icon may have jumped the gun on revealing this, then, as he has a lot on his plate right now. Over the past year, he’s contributed voice work to James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, shot superhero drama Samaritan, reworked Rocky IV into a director’s cut entitled Rocky vs. Drago and is primed to appear in the long-in-development Little America, an action movie set in a world where China owns America.
For my money, this means production on Demolition Man 2 isn’t happening until 2022 and the earliest we’ll see the movie will be 2023 (just in time for the 30th anniversary). But however they do it, let’s just hope it finally explains the three seashells.
