Home Entertainment After surprising pandemic era success, Greenland is getting a sequel

After surprising pandemic era success, Greenland is getting a sequel

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One of the pandemic era’s biggest surprises, 2020 sleeper hit Greenland is getting a sequel. Titled Greenland: Migration, the upcoming sequel will once again be directed by Ric Roman Waugh and see Gerard Butler and Morena Baccarin reprising their roles, with returning writer Chris Sparling penning the script once more.

It’s at this point I have to ask: Have you watched Greenland yet? I’m just going to assume the answer is “No” as the film was released right in the heat of the COVID-19 pandemic. On top of that, the blurb for this film was that it followed a civil engineer frantically trying to get his family to a government bunker in the titular country before a giant meteorite slams into the Earth. Combine that with the fact that it was from the duo of Butler and Waugh who were reteaming after their work on London Has Fallen and Angel Has Fallen, and you probably thought that this was going to just be another dumb Hollywood disaster movie and gave it a pass. That’s what I did, and I could not have been more wrong.

Greenland ended up being a well-acted and visceral thriller with some effectively sombre familial drama beats. Butler and Baccarin as John and Allison Garrity, a couple on the verge of a marital breakdown who have to put aside their problems to focus on their son’s safety, knocked it out of the park. Waugh also turned in the best directing performance of his career as he managed to tell this gripping, grounded story, against the backdrop of a world-ending spectacle. As Waugh noted in a press release announcing this sequel, “Greenland spoke to our humanity in the middle of a global catastrophic event, highlighting what people are capable of doing to one another, both good and bad, when it’s life or death. The irony is we made the first film pre-Covid and watched many situations come to reality.”

Whether it was due to contemporary timing or not, the result was a film that got a surprisingly great critical reception. That strong word of mouth led to it debuting in the #1 spot in 26 countries around the world – including Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Russia – in July last year and going on to earn $52 million off a $35 million budget despite strict lockdowns. Greenland was initially set to also hit the few US theatres left open in August 2020, but distributor STXFilms decided to skip American cinemas completely and first gave it an exclusive streaming debut on HBO Max before it got a further wide SVOD release on other streaming platforms. And while we don’t have any official numbers, the word on the street is that they were very good.

Good enough to get us this sequel which will be picking up right after the events of the first film, as “the Garrity family, who survive a near-extinction level event when an interstellar comet hits the earth, must leave the safety of the Greenland bunker and embark on a perilous journey across the decimated frozen wasteland of Europe to find a new home.” Production on Greenland: Migration is expected to begin sometime next year, so we can probably only expect this one in theatres in late 2022. Make sure you watch it this time.

Last Updated: June 15, 2021

One Comment

  1. KzA

    June 15, 2021 at 09:34

    Ugh….I think I’ll give that a skip. Gimme a break.

    Reply

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