For years, director David Cronenberg has been trying to assemble the pieces for a sequel to his 2007 gangster film Eastern Promises. However, one of the film's stars has now revealed that a second installment will probably never see the light of day.
Vincent Cassel, who starred in the film alongside Naomi Watts and Viggo Mortensen, told The Independent that “[Cronenberg] had a wonderful script" for the Eastern Promises sequel. "We were ready to do it and I don’t know why it collapsed," Cassel said. "Now I don’t think it will happen anymore.” Eastern Promises starred Watts as Anna, a London-based midwife who delivers the baby of a 14-year-old prostitute. As the film goes on, it is revealed that the girl had been forced into prostitution by the Russian mafia, and Anna ends up crossing paths with ruthless crime boss Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl) and his driver Nikolai (Mortensen), along with Semyon's son, the bumbling drunk Kirill (Cassel). The sequel would have reportedly picked up where the first film left off, with Kirill and Nikolai thinking they inherited Semyon's crime empire despite the fact that Nikolai secretly works as a double agent.
The Complicated History of Cronenberg's Eastern Promises Sequel
Eastern Promises has become something of a cult film and was praised for its accurate depictions of sex trafficking and mob violence. Fans have long been pressing for a sequel, and a potential follow-up has been in the works since at least 2010. However, Focus Features, which distributed the original film, eventually decided to pass on the sequel, and the project fell apart. The sequel has since languished in multiple iterations, with Cronenberg both attached and not attached at different points. The latest attempt to launch the film saw the original screenwriter of Eastern Promises, Steven Knight, return to pen a follow-up script, with Knight telling Collider in 2019 that the film was "close to getting into production." This film, called Small Dark Look, was slated to star Jason Statham and would have served less as a direct sequel and more as a spinoff, but the project has not had any recent developments.
This film would have reportedly had a slightly different premise than the original plans for the sequel. "I really wanted to see Nikolai go back to Russia, because one of the things I wanted in the first movie was that you see a bunch of Russians in London, but you never see them in Russia,” Cronenberg told IndieWire. “In other words, you experience their exile, and they are trying to recreate some of Russia within London.”
For now, though, all indications are pointing to the Eastern Promises sequel being shelved. This may not be all bad news for Cronenberg, though, as the famed director still has a number of projects in the works. He is slated to re-team with Cassel for the upcoming sci-fi film The Shrouds, which is scheduled to begin filming in 2023. According to the film's logline, Cassel will play "Karsh, an innovative businessman, and grieving widower, who builds a device to connect with the dead inside a burial shroud." Cronenberg will direct and also write the feature. The director also received positive reviews for his 2022 film Crimes of the Future, a sci-fi drama starring Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, and Kristen Stewart.