The “Road House” sequel just got a lot more interesting as now it’s going to be a fight between duelling projects.
“Road House” began back as the cult 1989 feature starring Patrick Swayze as James Dalton, the bouncer for a newly refurbished Missouri roadside bar. It was followed up by the little-seen direct-to-video title “Road House 2” starring Johnathon Schaech as the son of Swayze’s character.
Then last year came “Road House,” a remake/re-imagining of the original film starring Jake Gyllenhaal as an ex-UFC fighter who takes a job as a bouncer in the Florida Keys. That film was helmed by Doug Liman for Amazon MGM Studios.
Liman publicly criticised Amazon for bypassing a wide theatrical release for the film and initially said he would not attend the film’s premiere at SXSW in protest – though ultimately he did. Gyllenhaal supported Amazon’s claim that it was always a streaming play, but Liman has stood by his deal being for a full theatrical release.
The 2024 remake premiered in March and was a big streaming hit, pulling in 50 million worldwide viewers in its first two weekends. The results were so big that a sequel was quickly greenlit with Ilya Naishuller slated to direct, while Dave Bautista, Aldis Hodge and Leila George will star. Production has just gotten underway on that.
Now things have taken another turn today as Deadline reports that Liman has quietly acquired the sequel rights to the original 1989 film from its screenwriter R. Lance Hill. The result will be “Road House: Dylan,” a new sequel to the 1989 original. In other words, duelling “Road House” sequels.
How this has come about is due to a copyright infringement lawsuit over the franchise’s ownership currently underway, with Hill maintaining he wrote the film as a spec script and thus lawfully recaptured rights to his screenplay in November 2023 – 35 years after selling it to United Artists.
If the work was deemed ‘work for hire’, however, such a claim would not be allowed, and Amazon and MGM counter that the script was sold through his loan-out corporation, Lady Amos Inc., and thus qualifies as a work for hire. The case is still ongoing with an appeal in the Ninth Circuit now underway.
