The sequel to the 2018 prehistoric bloodthirsty shark thriller fronted by Jason Statham, The Meg 2: The Trench, is finally in production. Variety has confirmed that The Meg 2 has begun shooting in the Warner Bros. studios just outside London. In 2018, the simplistic premise of Jason Statham fighting a 75-foot shark allowed audiences to relive the tense but silly nostalgia of the Jaws franchise with an entirely new storyline, budget, and characters. And with that film bringing in $530 million worldwide, audiences will be expecting much more than hand-to-shark combat from Statham for the newer installment.
In 2021, the author of the novel Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror, Steve Alten, announced that he had finished writing the sequel The Meg 2: The Trench, which will have a much darker tone than the previous installment with the potential for this release to be rated R. Taking the lead from Jon Turteltaub as director will be Ben Wheatley, whose notable work thrives on building tension and have audiences flinching from visceral horror.
Statham and Bingbing Li are assumed to reprise their roles in the sequel as U.S. Navy rescue diver Jonas Taylor and Oceanographer Suyin. The Meg 2 will also welcome back screenwriters Dean Georgaris, Erich Hoeber, Jon Hoeber, producers Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Belle Avery, and executive producer Catherine Xujun Ying. Jason Statham, who is currently filming The Expendables 4, will have more creative control of The Meg 2 this time around due to the action stars' expressed disappointment with the previous films' PG 13 rating.
The film may follow Jonas exploring the thermocline from where his original megalodon escaped; if this is the case, Statham could encounter a previously unknown breeding ground for megs' and may have to find a way to destroy it. With the director of High Rise and Kill List in charge, The Meg 2 is sure to make audiences wince, providing a much more suspenseful and graphic thriller that shark fans deserve. Wheatley has already spiked fans expectations as he acknowledged to ComicBook.com the heavy burden of joining an already successful franchise:
"It's an opportunity to do action on such an insanely large scale that it's just unbelievable. From doing Free Fire, which was, I thought, was all my Christmases came at once in terms of action, this is just unbelievable. And just doing the storyboards for it, just thinking and going, 'Oh,' it's just … I feel a heavy responsibility for it, to make sure that it kind of delivers, to all the big shark fans out there."
With the original cast and crew returning and Wheatley taking the helm, it appears that The Meg 2 could be the dark shark action that fans have been missing and bring a new level of suspense intense graphic scenes that its predecessor was missing.
Source: Variety