Back in 2010, Universal’s genre arm, Rogue Pictures, released the truly awful Skyline into theaters. With a $10 million budget the film grossed $66.8 million worldwide. Despite warnings from a few readers I watched it a few months after its release and it prompted me to write a scathing evaluation, though looking back it reminded me of what co-director siblings Greg and Colin Strause said on their audio commentary track toward the end of the film:
Colin says, “The secret idea with this movie is that it’s basically like a comic book movie and this is the prequel.”
Greg again adds his ever important two cents, “Yeah, this is the origin story.”
Colin then explains the nature of how these things work, “Normally you do the regular movie first and then you’d come back and shoot the prequel later. We basically shot the prequel first. And being able to do that, and ending it on this cool big rock music kind of thing, is to kind of show that, Oh, crap this is not the movie you were coming in to see. You didn’t realize this whole movie was about… of all the humans in the entire world, this is the one guy that actually built up a resistance and became an alien. It’s his origin story and then about how she gets off the ship and you can kind of see where this whole story can actually unfold into some really interesting places in Skyline 2, 3, 4.”
Well, pushing aside the fact they didn’t make a prequel they just made what’s commonly referred to as the first movie in what they hope will be a franchise, it appears their dreams of more Skyline-related films is about to come true, but not necessarily in the way they envisioned it. In fact, it’s nearly the complete opposite.
It was announced today screenwriter Liam O’Donnell, who co-wrote the original film, wrote a Skyline spin-off called Beyond Skyline which he will direct and Frank Grillo (Captain America: The Winter Soldier) will star. The film will find Grillo playing a detective who fights to free his son from a terrifying alien warship. Pre-production is underway in Indonesia and Singapore with shooting to begin in December. The Strause brothers, or “Brothers Strause” as they were credited on the first film will produce.
