While it seems like thetitle troublesare over forDoug Liman’sEdge of Tomorrowfranchise–which was once known asAll You Need Is Killbased on theHiroshi Sakurazakanovel of the same title–little is known about the follow-up film’s cast, characters, or story. Recently revealed asLive Die Repeat and Repeat, a mouthful of a title that harkens back to the 2014 sci-fi film’s tagline of “Live, Die, Repeat”, fans can expect to seeTom Cruise’s Major William Cage andEmily Blunt’s badass Sergeant Rita Vrataski return at an as-of-yet undetermined date. But some other new details have emerged, courtesy of Liman himself.
If you want to hear Liman talk about his recent, current, and upcoming projects, be sure to head on over toMTV’s Happy Sad Confused podcast(hat tip to a Collider reader for the heads up!); Liman shows up about halfway through to talk aboutThe Wall, and the lovely and talentedAlexandra Daddariois a guest as well. Stick around for the whole thing if you’d like, including some funny insight on Liman’s shared living space with Cruise and screenwriterGary Spinellifor their upcoming filmAmerican Made. Or, if you’re just interested in theLive Die Repeat and Repeatnews, feel free to read along below.
Liman is sticking with his description of theEdge of Tomorrowfollow-up as “a sequel that’s a prequel,” which has been his linesince late last year. Liman clarified to MTV that, “It really is. And when you see it, you’ll be like, ‘I get exactly what he meant by that.’”
The first big nugget of info Liman dropped in this interview was the tease of a movie-stealing character, which he mentioned while discussing how to avoid sequelitis:
“I think what people tend to do with sequels is they just make them bigger. And I’m like, ‘No, a sequel should besmaller.’ You did the first film as sort of the ad campaign for the sequel, so now you don’t need as much action, and in the case ofEdge of Tomorrow, people obviously loved the comedy and they loved the situation … so we can do way more focus on Tom’s character and Emily Blunt’s character, and there’s a third character in the sequel that’s gonna for sure steal the movie. We can focus on that. I don’t need an action sequence every two minutes.
Liman didn’t mention that new character again–could it be one of the time-bending aliens?–but he did go on to talk about the story of theEdge of Tomorrowfranchise and how the sequel/prequel will start off:
“I see this as a two-movie franchise; there’s the completion of the story we set up in the first movie and the relationships between Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt—because, remember, at the end of the first movie, she doesn’t know who he is—and that’s gonna launch us into an amazing new direction.
It does pick up right where we left off, but it doesn’t keep going forward, because we’d screw with time, because the aliens screwed with time.”
Fans ofEdge of Tomorrowfound plenty of humor in the clever and increasingly complicated ways that Cruise’s character died over and over again throughout the film. Expect that to continue but in a different way in this film:
“It’s mostly not on the battlefield, so there’s a whole new arena of fights we’re going to do using a lot of the technology, but also, because it is a prequel, it’s a lot of the precursor stuff. I’m really interested in the details of that … Like batteries, do they run out on these suits? I mean, they must have batteries. Or he gets stuck with the menu in the wrong language, just the reality of that menu stuck in the wrong language when you’re in the middle of a battlefield and aliens are all around you and you gotta get the suit working again, that detail gives you drama and excitement. And humor. In the sequel, I’m creating an environment where I get to have even more of those details.”
There are currently no confirmed production start dates, full cast reveals, or a release date forLive Die Repeat and Repeat, but we’ll have updates made available to you as they arrive. In the meantime, be sure to let us know your thoughts in the comments below!
