One of the more unexpected film hires in recent years is that of enlisting British genre director Ben Wheatley, the maker behind the pitch-dark folk horror “Kill List” and the wacky warehouse shootout film “Free Fire,” to direct the sequel to “The Meg”.
The 2018 first film about the giant prehistoric shark was helmed by family film veteran Jon Turteltaub, the man responsible for the “National Treasure” franchise along with feel-good movies like “Cool Runnings,” “While You Were Sleeping” and Disney’s “The Kid”.
Wheatley is almost the polar opposite of that, so how would he handle the constraints of a PG-13 giant shark movie? With a lot of planning, it seems.
In a chat with Total Film (via Slashfilm), Wheatley revealed one way he was able to avoid the new film’s budget blowing out like so many other films this year have. Namely he went old school and used downtime during COVID to map out the entire film ahead of time:
“By the time I got to ‘The Meg,’ I’d done a lot of effects work, and I had an inkling of it. And because of the pandemic, I had an extra six or seven months, so I storyboarded the whole thing, every frame of it. So when we came to start it, there was a massive amount of prep that had been done. I don’t like the idea of these tales of people making it up on the day. I wanted every dollar on screen.”
Indeed, the cost of filmmaking has become a big topic in recent months due to exorbitant budgets and franchises like Marvel and “Mission: Impossible” finding themselves in production or reshoots as opposed to going in with a clear plan ahead of time.
The first film was made on a budget or around $130-178 million, though it famously had to swallow many years of development costs. That won’t be the case with the sequel, which hopes to capture the box-office in the way the first film did with its $530.2 million haul.
“Meg 2: The Trench” opens in cinemas on August 4th.
