Gerard Butler is comparing the tone of his forthcoming sequel Angel Has Fallen to Hugh Jackman’s final Wolverine adventure Logan. The first two entries in Butler’s action franchise has provided audiences with some gleeful R-rated thrills. Olympus Has Fallen was a cartoonish action flick best described as Die Hard in the White House. The story and characters were paper thin, but Butler’s charisma and the over the top action scenes made it a surprise hit.
The scale only got bigger with 2016’s London Has Fallen, where Butler’s gruff bodyguard has to protect the president from assassins while London is under attack. Instead of going bigger for the next outing, Angel Has Fallen will instead scale things back a little and feature Banning trapped onboard Air Force One with terrorists.
Toning things down was completely the intention, Butler confirmed in a new interview with CinemaBlend. The actor was aware that going even bigger with Angel Has Fallen is probably the wrong move, so instead he wanted to make a sequel that was more character focused.
The Logan comparison is an interesting one for the next movie and indicates Banning won’t be quite the superhuman warrior shown in the previous movie. While the Has Fallen franchise is hardly sophisticated entertainment, they’ve done well catering to fans of harder-edged action films. The last few years have also seen a steady rise in the box-office popularity of R-rated films, thanks to the successes of IT, Deadpool, Get Out and Logan itself.
You know, it’s fun to watch a city falling or the White House falling, and it’s fun to watch it again, and you go ‘what?’ The joke would be, ‘What’s next? Tokyo?’ OK. So let’s take it in another direction and go inner world, and it just feels a little more surprising. It was almost like Logan was to Wolverine, is our Angel Has Fallen was to the first two.
Little is currently known about the storyline for Angel Has Fallen, other than the setting. At the moment it seems likely Banning will be protecting a new president this time, as Aaron Eckhart has counted himself out of returning once more. If that’s the case, Morgan Freeman’s vice president from the previous movies seems like the obvious successor; though the more interesting road would be making Banning himself the president instead.
Angel Has Fallen doesn’t currently have a release date, but we’ll keep you updated when more information comes in.
MORE: Aaron Eckhart Not Returning For Angel Has Fallen
Source: CinemaBlend
