The success of Now You See Me is one of this summer’s mysteries. It wasn’t a bad film per se, but it was hardly a knock out and yet, on a rather large budget of $75 million, the film ended up grossing over $293 million worldwide.
The sleight of hand thriller was directed by Louis Leterrier and starred a large ensemble including Jesse Eisenberg, Isla Fisher, Morgan Freeman, Woody Harrelson, Mark Ruffalo, Dave Franco, Melanie Laurent and Michael Caine. Plans for a sequel to the film were first revealed back in early August, but now Letterier has confirmed plans for a follow up with Movie Web saying:
We’re actively working on the sequel to Now You See Me, so that is happening. We’re writing it, and it’s pretty fun. We had such a great time doing that and we loved the characters. Our biggest problem now is that we have too many great ideas. We’re sort of saying, ‘What if he would do that? That would be amazing, I want to see this, I want to see that.’ We want it to be intense and as twisty as the first one, but also learn more about the characters and go deeper, what a great sequel should do. That’s going to take not too long, but enough so, just like in the first one, it’s perfectly crafted. If you think about it, David Copperfield takes five years to prep, to create and prep. We just have a couple of years to do ours. David Copperfield was always saying, ‘Your biggest challenge is you only have two years to do your movie, or one year to do your movie.’
I love how they’re biggest problem is they have “too many great ideas”. If I run this through the Hollywood Speak Translator 5000™ it returns: “We’re trying to make it really big and put a whole bunch of twists and turns in it to where it basically shits on itself.”
You also have to laugh at his comparison to David Copperfield taking five years to prep, but they only have two. He doesn’t stop to consider how much better the film may be if they didn’t work on a specific timeline, but instead let the story come together at its own pace. So it goes.
Now I’m not saying Now You 2 Can See Me Too Or Can You?* won’t be any good. The first film was mildly decent. I went in with low expectations and came away calling it “[not] a great movie, but a serviceable one” and “a satisfying diversion that allows the audience to play along and take part in the fun.” Does it leave us with the desire to see more? Not at all, but that’s apparently what we’re going to get and the mid credits sequence from the first film (see below) isn’t holding any secrets.
* No, that’s not the actual title.
