A lot of hearts were broken last week when The Raid director Gareth Evans said he had no plans to make The Raid 3. *sniffle* I won't cry, I swore to myself I wouldn't cry...
The director has moved on to other pursuits, like his upcoming Netflix thriller Apostle starring Dan Stevens. So while the story of Iko Uwais' heroic cop Rama won't continue, Evans still has an idea of where a third Raid movie would have gone, and it sounds like an expansion of the gangland direction The Raid 2 went. He tells Collider...
"I knew what I wanted to do with The Raid 3, I knew what that story was going to be. If I was ever going to make it, it really had to have happened after we made The Raid 2. The storyline was going to pick up – I’ll give you a little bit of it – if you were watching The Raid 2 and rewound from the ending about 15-20 minutes back to when Goto gives instructions to his right-hand man to go kill the police, kill the politicians, ‘kill everyone that we work with, we’re going to start fresh,’ that was going to be the first scene of The Raid 3. It was going to be more about the yakuza than it was going to be about Rama; Rama was not really going to feature in that storyline much at all, it was going to be about the bosses in Japan realizing that someone in Jakarta that represented them started to fuck with the politicians and the police in a country they don’t belong in. It was going to be the fallout from that.”
“It was going to be a 95 minutes, 100 minutes, sort of… escape into the jungles of Indonesia type of thing. But it really needed to be made at that period of time. Four years, five years later to go back and try to recreate that, it felt a bit disingenuous. I made three martial arts films in a row, I wanted to explore other things first. It was always a cool idea, but it stopped being really special for me. The Raid, it gave me an awful lot that I’m very appreciative about, but that adventure is kind of over now.”
I remember some being disappointed The Raid 2 was so much heavier in plot but I totally dug it, and I definitely would have welcomed more. Too bad we'll never get to see it. I just hope Evans and Uwais aren't done working together. That partnership is pure magic.
One of the projects that was cool enough to make us forget about The Raid 3 for a while was a potential Deathstroke film, which would have centered on the popular DC Universe villain played by Joe Manganiello in Justice League. Evans entered talks for the gig last year but now tells Comicbook.com those discussions went absolutely nowhere...
"I had a phone call which I think was publicized a bit, about Deathstroke with DC. We talked about that before, we had a few conversations. One of the guys at DC and at Warner Brothers, one with Joe, who has been on the character for some time now, who is super passionate about that character, by the way. I've never met anyone who knows more about their character."
"Nothing really went beyond those conversations. I haven't heard anything for a really long time. To be honest, every time I see an article written I keep wanting to ask, 'Okay, what is it you guys know that I don't know?' Because I haven't heard anything for a good while yet. So I don't know if that will ever come back full circle at some point. But I know I haven't had any conversation about that project for a long time now."
Oh well. At this point who knows where or when Deathstroke will pop up next, if anywhere. The DCEU is in a state of flux, and sadly that leaves talented filmmakers like Evans out in the cold.
