Before Wolf Man, Leigh Whannell directed The Invisible Man. The horror thriller was a critical and commercial success, grossing $144.5 million on a budget of $7 million and earning rave reviews. That typically spells sequel in any language, but The Invisible Man 2 has yet to materialize. While speaking with THR, Whannell explained why he doesn’t want to develop another Invisible Man movie.
“I can’t imagine gluing more story onto that. Sequels are mostly driven by the economics of Hollywood. ‘We scored, we did well, and let’s do it again. Let’s get them back there.’ And I’ve been a front-row viewer of that,” Whannell said. “I have also written two movies [Saw and Insidious] that have turned into long-running franchises with varying degrees of artistic success. I’m not going to pretend that every movie in the Saw franchise is … That film has become its own beast, and I sit outside of it now.“
Whannell continued, “I was so happy with Invisible Man’s ending that I just don’t feel the artistic need to go forward with it. The financial need is something different. The studio might look at that and say, ‘Well, we feel like it should keep going because we want to make more money.’ But on an artistic level, I’m like, ‘That’s a nice closed door there. Let’s just leave it closed.’” I would agree. Not every film needs a sequel.
Although Whannell isn’t interested in The Invisible Man 2, Elisabeth Moss is down to return and has even been working on developing the project. “We are, I would say – and by we, I mean Blumhouse and my production company [Love & Squalor Pictures] – we are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” Moss said last year. “And I feel very good about it. We are very much intent on continuing that story, for sure.“
As for Wolf Man, the film hasn’t been received quite as well as The Invisible Man. Our own Chris Bumbray found the film to be well-acted and shot, but it let him down in the fright department. “Wolf Man has one major failing – it’s simply not scary,” he wrote. “Blake’s transformation is played for pathos and drama, and even if we know there’s another wolf around there stalking the family, the attack scenes are limited and shot so darkly that a lot of the werewolf stuff is hard to make out.” You can check out the rest of Bumbray’s review right here.
Would you like to see The Invisible Man 2, or is Whannell right to leave the story alone?
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