Sure, it was trashed by critics (scoring just 30% on Rotten Tomatoes) and it managed to actively insult fans of the original film, but Warner Brothers’ remake of Clash Of The Titans still managed to pull almost half a billion dollars at the worldwide box office, which has lead studio brass to start aggressively pushing for a sequel.Now there seems to be some positive movement on that front.
Late this past week, the Los Angeles Times reported that the studio has been meeting with several directors and that out of them, Jonathan Liebesman seems to be Warner’s favorite for the project. Liebsman already has the horror films Darkness Falls and the 2006 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre on his resume and is currently working on the alien invasion story Battle: Los Angeles. He is also working on another mythological project for Warners, an adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey.
Whomever Warners hires, they’ll be working from a script by Dan Mazeau and David Leslie Johnson. The Hollywood Reporter stated on Friday that the pair had been hired the two to develop a treatment for the sequel with writer Greg Berlanti before writing the full script. Oddly, Mazeau and Johnson are both solo writers, not having worked together before. Is this a move on Warners’s part to speed up the development process by bringing writers with different strengths in to simultaneously work on different aspects of the screenplay. We’ll see how this Frankenstein approach to creating a script will work, but I have my doubts.
The writers will have their work cut out for them in assembling a usable shooting script. Clash Of The Titans 2 will have to start principal photography by early 2011 in order for star Sam Worthington to be free to fulfill his commitment to Avatar 2 which is expected to film later in the year.
About the only good news out of all this is that the studio is planning on shooting the proposed sequel in 3D, thus avoiding the horrible look that the rushed post-production 2D to 3D conversion gave the first film.
