It’s looking like Netflix’s 2017 fantasy buddy cop film Bright is about to get a sequel. Deadline is reporting that the streaming service is negotiating with Louis Leterrier, who directed The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance and The Incredible Hulk, to direct the flick.
Deadline says that the sequel will reunite Will Smith and Joel Edgerton, who played a pair of cops (Daryl Ward, a human and Nick Jakoby, an orc, respectively) in an alternate Los Angeles where a bunch of fantasy species live alongside one another in relative harmony. Ward has some lingering issues: he was wounded months earlier in a shootout, and suspects that Jakoby—the first Orc police officer on the force—let the suspect go.
David Ayers, who directed the initial film, isn’t returning behind the camera, as he’s working on a new version of the Dirty Dozen, and has other projects on his plate. However, he did write the script for the sequel, along with Evan Spiliotopoulos (The Huntsman: Winter’s War, Beauty and the Beast) and T.S. Nowlin (Pacific Rim: Uprising, The Maze Runner trilogy).
A sequel to the film isn’t a huge surprise: the film has “film franchise” written all over it, and months after the film debuted on the platform in 2017, Netflix ordered a sequel, with Smith signed on to reprise his role.
The story will apparently continue the story of the two partners, but with more of an international focus. According to Deadline, the film will begin production “as soon as it is possible to begin making films again.”
The film wasn’t well received by critics (it holds a 28% Rotten rating on Rotten Tomatoes), but audiences seemed to enjoy it—it earned a 84% score on RT). Film YouTuber Lindsay Ellis provided a 44-minute look at the film, calling out the haphazard worldbuilding, and structural problems. But despite those issues, the film was a solid hit for Netflix, and helped demonstrate that it could handle a big budget blockbuster, and has led to others from the platform, including the recently-released Extraction, starring Chris Hemsworth (which also apparently has a sequel in the works). Hopefully, this sequel will fix some of those structural issues, and will turn out to be a bit better when it debuts.
