After the massive success of Josh Trank’s Chronicle (a success so profound that the director has now been entrusted with the new Fantastic Four, a Venom film, and possibly The Red Star and Shadow of Colossus adaptations), it was only inevitable that a sequel to the found-footage teen-superheroes-gone-wild feature would shoot to the top of Fox’s wish list, but Chronicle 2 is still getting some big kinks ironed out.
Speaking with IGN at the Middle East Comic-Con, screenwriter Max Landis was surprisingly candid on just what is going on with the script in general and the new film at large. Right out of the gate, Landis cleared up some on confusion regarding a few comments his dad John Landis made about the new film (sigh, parents), saying that “there was this whole announcement that they wanted to just do the same thing again because my father said that. My father is not involved in Chronicle 2. He doesn’t know the process. It was not his place to say that.” Ugh, stay out of my room, dad!
So how is the actual process going then, young Landis? The scribe reports that his new script is “really dark” (despite the fact that Chronicle ended on a somewhat hopeful note) and while there may be chatter hinting otherwise, Fox liked the script and it’s now a” question…more of ‘How do we all compromise to get something we want?’ And that’s an incredibly slow process.” As Landis puts it, “the truth is when you have a movie that was as successful as Chronicle was, it’s not as quick of a process. There are a lot more voices coming in and saying ‘This is what the sequel should be’ because there’s a bigger expectation and a bigger fear of failure. And that’s really what’s going on with Chronicle 2.”
While that’s all Landis could offer up about the film, the busy screenwriter does believe the sequel will happen, and even weighed in with some strangely honest odds on how it would turn out, saying that he is “60–75% sure that it will be a pretty damn good movie.”