Just when Jason Statham thought it was safe to go back in the water, he’ll be returning for a sequel to his 2018 prehistoric shark thriller The Meg. Steve Alten, the author of the novel upon which The Meg was based, announced in his September 2020 newsletter that he’d finished writing a sequel called Meg 2: The Trench. Alten said that the tone of the new script is “dark” and that the eventual movie might be rated R. With Ben Wheatley of Kill List, Sightseers, and A Field in England in the director’s chair, an R rating is practically a given.
The sequel announcement was hardly surprising after the first movie brought in over $500 million at the worldwide box office. Critics weren’t too thrilled with it, but there’s not much room for nuance in a movie about a 75-foot shark. The Meg had a simplistic premise – essentially Jaws with a much bigger shark – but it fully committed to that premise. All the goofy fun that audiences expected from that premise was realized in the movie. The meg spends the third act prowling around a crowded beach, eating mouthfuls of tourists, just like the posters promised.
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Audiences went to this movie wanting to see Jason Statham fighting a giant shark and that’s exactly what they got. In the final battle, Statham actually gets out of his submersible and engages the meg in hand-to-hand combat – and wins. The Meg gave summer moviegoers all the pure escapism they could hope for, and Meg 2 has the opportunity to do the same thing a few summers later. But if the wildest thing that happens in the upcoming sequel is Statham fighting another giant shark, it’ll be disappointing because we’ve already seen that. Meg 2 needs to up the ante with even bigger scares and wilder set pieces than its predecessor.
A common problem with sequels is simply copying what worked in the first one. While the first Guardians of the Galaxy and Kingsman movies both arrived as a breath of fresh air that revitalized their respective genres, their sequels failed to recapture that surprise because they just felt like more of the same. Die Hard 2, Home Alone 2, and The Hangover Part II literally just did the plot of the first movie all over again. There’s a risk that in Meg 2, another megalodon will escape, so Statham will assemble another team of scientists to kill it, because that’s what happened in the first movie and it worked perfectly fine to the tune of $500 million.
But what made the first Meg movie so refreshing is that it took its shark action a lot further than the other Jaws rip-offs out there dare to. While movies like 47 Meters Down and The Shallows fell short of the audience’s expectations, The Meg went above and beyond what audiences were expecting to see. The Stath literally kills the meg with his bare hands as he hitches a ride on its head and jams a blade into its eye. There’s potential for a long-running Jason Statham vs. sea monsters franchise here, but the stories need to keep evolving and exploring new corners of the mythology and going bigger and bolder than before if that franchise is going to survive past its second installment.
The sequel’s subtitle, The Trench, suggests that the sequel will take Statham into the thermocline from which the original movie’s megalodons escaped. If that’s the case, then it could copy James Cameron’s trick from Aliens. Cameron followed up the threat of one xenomorph from Ridley Scott’s Alien with a swarm of dozens of them. There were technically two megs in the first Meg movie, but the protagonists only had to face one at a time. In the sequel, Statham could be up against dozens of giant sea creatures at once.
Wheatley doesn’t have any experience directing mega-budget blockbusters, but his movies have featured plenty of action. Free Fire is essentially a feature-length shootout. Speaking recently about storyboarding Meg 2, Wheatley said he saw the project as “an opportunity to do action on such an insanely large scale that it’s just unbelievable.” He added, “I feel a heavy responsibility to make sure that it kind of delivers to all the big shark fans out there,” so it sounds like the movie is in safe hands.
Based on the dystopian mysteries of High-Rise and the Hitchcockian thrills of Rebecca, Wheatley could be the perfect person to helm The Meg’s upcoming sequel. Not only does he understand the need for big shark action above all; he’ll be able to bring a degree of suspense and tension to the sequel that was somewhat missing from its brazenly unsubtle predecessor. Whatever happens in Meg 2, it can’t just rehash the first movie. The first movie was a great jumping-off point for its sequels to go even bigger and crazier.
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