was ok for it's time, but I never felt like it created an interesting enough world to be followed-up on. Then four years later we got The Chronicles of Riddick
, and apparently everyone agreed with me. The much larger budget($120M) helped give the film a crisper, more refined look, but there just wasn't enough of a fanbase there and the film flopped. Still, Vin Diesel and series director David Twohy have been committed to making another one. Twohy has been working on the scripts for two potential sequels since around 2008, with the plan being to produce the film's outside the studio system(they were with Universal previously). The duo took to Diesel's Facebook page to update fans on the status of the film, currently titled Riddick...
David Twohy: The movie itself is gonna be a lot like 'Pitch Black' because of the money involved because we want to maintain our "R" rating.
Vin Diesel: Which is a BIG deal.
David Twohy: At any cost..
Vin Diesel: We've committed to going "R".
David Twohy: It'll probably be a little tougher than 'Chronicles' was but more like 'Pitch Black', in that regard anyway. We are gonna be lean, and we're gonna do it quick, and it's gonna be a cool movie I can tell you that.
I like their commitment to a hard 'R' rating, and the desire to make the film less expensive. I just think Chronicles was too bloated of a project, especially considering how much success they found with fewer resources on Pitch Black. Sci-fi is such a niche genre right now that it pays to do more with less. I look at a movie like Babylon AD
, which Diesel also starred in and was very similar to Chronicles in a lot of ways. It was a very good film that by all rights would've been a success, but there's just not that much of an audience for sci-fi unless it involves some sort of alien invasion. True outer space epics(unless they're Star Trek
) are doomed to failure. 
