With Life now in cinemas and pretty much wowing the majority of moviegoers – you can find our thoughts here – it could well be that we’ll be getting a follow-up or two to the film down the line.

Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick confirmed that they’re hopeful of turning Life into a franchise… but be warned, there’s potential spoilers ahead for anyone who’s yet to see the Ryan Reynolds, Jake Gyllenhaal and Rebecca Ferguson-starring sci-fi thriller.

 

SPOILERS

In Life, the movie ends with an escape pod crash-landing on Earth and showing that Calvin is indeed still alive… and that he’s capable of reproducing.

On what that ending means going forward, Reese and Wernick explained, “We always wanted it to end in a creepy fashion that set up at least the possibility for future movies, but the script is very much a seesaw between Calvin having an advantage and the astronauts having an advantage. We always wanted them to be smart but then a new problem present itself so when they got out of the frying pan they found themselves in the fire. And it just so happened that the last twist was that, despite all their best intentions, Calvin was once again one step ahead of them at the end of the movie. It was very intentional and we just wanted to leave people with a real sense of goosebumps and anticipation of what might happen next.”

After saying that they “would love to be involved” in further Life movies, when asked on whether any sequel would be like the larger world of James Cameron’s Aliens in comparison to Ridley Scott’s tense, claustrophobic Alien, Reese enthused, “Completely. Just the fact that Calvin can now possibly reproduce, I think, is an interesting idea. We’ve dropped him in a situation that is teeming with life to hunt and to eat. That being the ocean, or the cost of Indonesia or Vietnam or wherever we are saying he’s landed. So that opens it up right there. But just the idea of firewalls could extend to Earth in the sense that they’ve now failed to contain Calvin to the station. The question, how would the Earth react? Obviously, this was an international effort, so there are a lot of countries cooperating. And again, they would be trying to contain this thing from moving forward and yet there might be more Calvins to deal with. To us, that screams interesting sequel.”

While Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick have hopes of turning Life into a franchise, and while many fans and critics have had a whole lot of love for the Daniel Espinosa-helmed film, right now the box office figures aren’t quite what Sony and Columbia Pictures were hoping for. The budget for the film was $58 million, so when marketing costs are taken into account, it’s believed that Life would need to hit at least the $200 million mark at the global box office to break even. Right now, the film has taken just shy of $30 million globally. If any sequel(s) could match the quality of the current movie, we need to keep our fingers crossed that Life can take home enough at the box office for a future movie to be greenlit.

As ever, expect more on this as and when it develops.

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