Corona | Coming Attractions

Derek Haas and Michael Brandt, who wrote the original Wanted movie screenplay, have just been hired to pen the sequel. "Michael and I were just hired by Uni to write Wanted 2," Haas tweeted this morning.

A little later, Haas followed up with this update: "To answer 2 questions I've been asked today: our draft of W2 will be Fox-less and Loom-less."

Maybe that Wanted sequel isn't so dead after all. "We are discussing Wanted 2 every month," states director Timur Bekmambetov to Empire magazine. "We are working on it now, but I think it will be after [Abraham] Lincoln [Vampire Hunter] because James (McAvoy) is working on the X-Men: First Class... It's why I decided to develop Lincoln without a studio, to keep control. It’s a big movie but independent too."

According to Vulture, Universal has pulled the plug on its Wanted sequel because Angelina Jolie has decided to not star in it. It's possible that the reason why she exited Wanted 2 was because the studio put a different project called Gravity into turnaround, giving it up for another movie studio to develop if they so chose to. That's what happened: Warner Bros. came in, picked up Gravity and they've now got Harry Potter producer David Heyman developing it. Jolie's attached to star in Gravity for WB, indicating that she was probably interested in making it when the movie was at Universal. So did Jolie decide not to star in Wanted 2 because Universal dropped Gravity?

Universal has picked the unlikely choice of screenwriter Evan Spiliotopoulos to write the screenplay for the sequel to Wanted. When we say unlikely, we mean that Spiliotopoulos' past credits have been for kiddie cartoon movies that don't feature characters shooting each other to death in graphic ways. [Full story]