While director Shawn Levy was out doing press for the upcoming Stranger Things Season 2 for Netflix he dropped a bit about a rumored Real Steel sequel. The original film was a great movie and was successful overseas, but it didn’t do very well at the domestic box office. Starring Evangeline Lilly and Hugh Jackman, Real Steel was a heartwarming story about a boy and his boxing robot.
In a recent interview with Collider, he spoke more about a long-rumored Real Steel sequel. Although its been years since the release of Real Steel, Levy says that he is keen on making the sequel:
“The most frequent tweet I get is about the sequel to Real Steel. I wish I had a conclusive answer. Here’s the truth: We started developing a sequel like six months before the movie came out. We knew as soon as we started previewing this movie and it was getting mid to high 90s at every test screening. It happens really rarely, but the movie had something that audiences responded to and so we started coming up with ideas for the sequel.
The simple truth, the most concise truth I can express, is that it proved, and it has proven, really hard to come up with a sequel that doesn’t feel like a re-hash of the first movie. Yeah, people wanted to see Atom beat Zeus, I would love to see Atom beat Zeus, but you don’t want to retell the story of kind of an alienation between Charlie and Max because that is really the plot of the first movie.
One area that I still would love to explore is that notion of how was Atom built? What is it about his design that might have embedded some artificial or organic intelligence and consciousness, such that he is self-aware to some extent? So all I’ll say is, we’ve attempted it a few times with a number of writers, and no draft got me, Hugh, and Steven all there to a yes in the same moment. It all felt like it wasn’t quite enough to promise a new story and a new movie.”
Levy went on to talk about a scene that was unfortunately cut from the theatrical release of the first movie. In the scene, Atom has a small reveal that he is not remote-controlled at all, and is in fact sentient. This is something that you will notice, when you watch the film again. Jackman and his son talk to Atom throughout the film, and Atom seems to listen. Levy says, “as warm-hearted as the movie was, that was one degree too fairy tale for that movie.”
A Real Steel 2 would be great, and might still be able to work. It hinges on whether or not a great script would ever turn up. I’m sure there is one out there, it just needs to find its way to Levy or Hugh Jackman. Jackman now is awaiting his highly anticipated X-Men movie Logan, but after that, his schedule would have a lot of breathing room.
Logan hits theaters on March 3, 2017, with Stranger Things season 2 coming sometime in 2017.
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