It's rare that a movie emerges from Sundance with the level of crossover success as Aneesh Chaganty's directorial debut, Searching. The little indie thriller starred John Cho as a single father in a desperate search to find his missing daughter, using the only tools he has at his disposal, namely the Internet. What set the film apart was Chaganty's use of ScreenLife technology to use device screens as perspective, adding to the movie's tension so much better than we've seen it done in other movies. The cheaply-produced film earned $75M worldwide, and those kind of numbers have Sony figuring out how to keep the story going.
Deadline reports interest by Sony's Stage 6 Films to develop a sequel to Searching and will reach out to Chaganty and the movie's creative team about an approach. The ending of the first movie doesn't lend itself to a natural sequel, so it's expected that we won't see the return of Cho or co-stars Debra Messing and Michelle La.
Assuming they continue to use the ScreenLife tech to keep the budget around $1M as with the first movie, there's no reason why Sony can't turn this into a successful, long-running franchise. Searching gave Cho a chance to have the spotlight pretty much all to himself, as virtually all of the movie's emotion is carried by him. If each movie gives a single actor that amount of they'll be flocking to be part of it.
