The long-awaited Judge Dredd reboot hasn’t even hit theaters yet, but that hasn’t stopped veteran Hollywood screenwriter Alex Garland from wanting to turn the latest iteration of the comic franchise into a trilogy.
“We’ll see a sequel if the gross is above $50 million in the US. It’s a simple financial equation. We’re an independent movie…In terms of Dark Judges, I wrote Death into this script, but it didn’t feesl right for the first film. I thought it felt right but after about 16 drafts and it really didn’t work out,” Garland recently told Bleeding Cool.
“I needed to have set up the city and Dredd first before taking on what is essentially a riff on the Judges. You need to know what the Judges are before you can subvert them. I wrote a second script which was about Dredd going out to the Cursed Earth. That was rejected for similar reasons. If they want to make sequels, I’ve got a story that goes from this one into the origins of Dredd and the city. Then the third one has would have a strange, existential attack from the Dark Judges.”
And although Comic-Con didn’t officially kick off until Thursday morning, crowds of attendees gathered on Wednesday afternoon to watch a free screening of Dredd presented by Karl Urban (Star Trek) and Olivia Thirlby (Juno).
According to the Hollywood Reporter, lines twisted around downtown San Diego’s Reading Cinemas as people waited to get inside the theater.
“I hope you like your films dark and gritty,” Urban told the cheering crowd. “I want to apologize to anyone who’s a fan of lycra and gold codpieces – you’re just going to have to wait for two hours.”
Dredd hits theaters nationwide on September 21, 2012.
