Doug Liman shares details on the Edge of Tomorrow sequel

Last Updated on July 31, 2021

When director Doug Liman's sci-fi alien invasion / time loop movie EDGE OF TOMORROW was first announced, it was going by the title of the Hiroshi Sakurazaka novel it was based on, All You Need Is Kill. Some folks really dig that title, but it always struck me as being ridiculous. I was just waiting for it to be changed, and was glad when the movie became EDGE OF TOMORROW. Sure, that's generic, but I'll take generic over All You Need Is Kill. Of course, the tagline "Live, Die, Repeat" became even more popular than its title, as evident from the fact that it's featured on the home video art much more prominently than the title.

As he crafts a "sequel that's a prequel" to the film, Liman is building off of the tagline's popularity by calling the follow-up LIVE DIE REPEAT AND REPEAT. Great… now we're back at ridiculous. 

Well, they can't seem to figure out what to call these things, but EDGE OF TOMORROW was an entertaining film and I'm looking forward to seeing what Liman and returning stars Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt will be bringing us with the prequel-sequel.

While appearing on MTV's Happy Sad Confused podcast, Liman dropped some interesting details about LIVE DIE REPEAT AND REPEAT (ugh), including the fact that he'll be going smaller with this one rather than bigger: 

I think what people tend to do with sequels is they just make them bigger. And I’m like, ‘No, a sequel should be smaller.’ You did the first film as sort of the ad campaign for the sequel, so now you don’t need as much action, and in the case of Edge of Tomorrow, people obviously loved the comedy and they loved the situation … so we can do way more focus on Tom’s character and Emily Blunt’s character, and there’s a third character in the sequel that’s gonna for sure steal the movie. We can focus on that. I don’t need an action sequence every two minutes."

Liman sees this as a two film franchise, saying that REPEAT AND REPEAT will offer a 

completion of the story we set up in the first movie and the relationships between Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt—because, remember, at the end of the first movie, she doesn’t know who he is—and that’s gonna launch us into an amazing new direction.
 
It does pick up right where we left off, but it doesn’t keep going forward, because we’d screw with time, because the aliens screwed with time."

Liman previously mentioned viewers enjoying the comedy in EDGE OF TOMORROW, and he promised that they can expect to get more laughs out of the troubles Cruise's character will be running into in the new film.

It’s mostly not on the battlefield, so there’s a whole new arena of fights we’re going to do using a lot of the technology, but also, because it is a prequel, it’s a lot of the precursor stuff. I’m really interested in the details of that … Like batteries, do they run out on these suits? I mean, they must have batteries. Or he gets stuck with the menu in the wrong language, just the reality of that menu stuck in the wrong language when you’re in the middle of a battlefield and aliens are all around you and you gotta get the suit working again, that detail gives you drama and excitement. And humor."

Liman recently dropped out of directing the horror-leaning superhero team-up movie JUSTICE LEAGUE DARK because another project of his, the YA novel adaptation CHAOS WALKING, is moving forward. He's probably going to be busy with CHAOS WALKING for a while, so it looks like LIVE DIE REPEAT AND REPEAT – which doesn't yet have a release date or a production schedule – is still a ways off.

Thanks to our friends over at Collider for providing the podcast transcription.