**This is your official spoiler warning. If you haven’t seen Split, turn back now. Spoilers for the ending of Split follow.**
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So if you’re reading this, then presumably you’ve seen Split, the new film from filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan. And if you’ve seen Split, you know that Shyamalan managed to stealth-make a new Unbreakable movie, as the ending revealed that the events of Split took place in the same universe as Bruce Willis’ David Dunn, who’s still alive and very aware of the emergence of James McAvoy’s The Horde. So…what’s next?
Fans have been asking for an Unbreakable sequel from Shyamalan for years, and now it seems like he’s finally ready to make a third Unbreakable movie, since Split technically counts as the second. Shyamalan teased the following on Twitter:
So he’s got an outline. Is Unbreakable 3 Shyamalan’s next movie? The filmmaker visited Josh Horowitz’s swell podcast HappySadConfused a few weeks ago, where he dove deep into spoilers on Split, talking pretty extensively about how the film came about, its connection to Unbreakable, and what’s next. When asked point-blank if the Split sequel is his next movie, Shyamalan said:
“I think so. I think it’s the next thing.”
The filmmaker at that time revealed that he was already working on the outline, teasing that this next movie by its nature has to be epic:
“I have a pretty detailed outline of like beats, scenes. It’s very long, which is worrying me, but I don’t see how we can—probably by its nature it needs to be kind of epic. The storyline that I’ve thought through feels very intricate.”
When it comes to specifics, Shyamalan was mum, but he did offer up a tease of what—at this point in time—he imagines Willis’ David Dunn was thinking when he looked up and saw the report about The Horde on the TV:
“My thought bubble would be—again don’t hold me to this—but Elijah never got out of the institution. He was just a guy who believed this, but David doesn’t quite 100% believe it that way, he just thinks that he is particularly meant to do this and is kind of faded a little bit. Like this idea of comic books that Elijah was saying the comic book world is based on reality, that it’s real—there’s no other evidence for this. It’s this crazy guy who has this bone disorder who’s in an insane asylum. But then this comes up and he’s like, ‘Oh my God, he’s right.’”
Shyamalan confirmed that the plan is for McAvoy, Willis, and Samuel L. Jackson to all star in the Split sequel, revealing Jackson’s reaction when he told him about Split:
“I said, ‘You know I might be doing this movie and I might combine these two movies, I don’t know if you’re interested in playing Mr. Glass [again],’ he’s like ‘I’m dying to play Mr. Glass! I keep telling you every time I see you!’”
However, while one might think this follow-up would simply be one big battle, Shyamalan said he needs to find a story hook that would ensure that Split 2 works just as well as a standalone movie:
“All I can say is this: If Unbreakable was about a guy who is the only person who survives a train wreck, everyone dies and he doesn’t have a scratch on him. How is that possible? That’s a high concept, really cool story. And then this one is three girls get abducted by a person that has this disorder that he believes he’s many people, and all of the different personalities are saying there’s another personality coming to get them, it’s called The Beast. That in and of itself is a really cool thing. This third movie needs to have its own idea. The high concept of that final movie can’t be, ‘It’s the final Unbreakable.’ There has to be something about that that makes it its own movie… That’s when I’ll be happiest, is when it’s its own movie. In a way it could be watched by itself.”
During the podcast, Shyamalan revealed that earlier drafts of Split had more explicit references to Unbreakable, including the notion that David and Mr. Glass were still battling in the city. He eventually discarded those ideas and settled on the fact that Mr. Glass is still in the asylum, but there was a special credit sequence that would’ve taken things further:
“There was another version of the credit sequence which was comic book, which was graphic images of The Beast and then David Dunn and then Elijah and then them all mixing together. When I saw it done I was like, ‘This is a fucking home run,’ and then when I put it on the movie it didn’t work… It’s one thing to say, ‘You saw an origin story,’ but to go into other characters…David Dunn is reacting to the news of The Horde. End of story. If you keep going it starts to undermine the movie you just saw.”
I think Shyamalan made the right call here. The Unbreakable reveal is played perfectly as-is in the movie, and I can’t wait to see what kind of story Shyamalan decides upon for the follow-up. It’s still early days so this all could very well change, but I highly recommend listening to the full podcast episode right here for a deep, insightful dive into the conception of this movie.
