Angelina Jolie is hardly prolific when it comes to churning out movies of late, and even less prolific when it comes to churning out good ones. When she does appear in movies she does so as one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, and as a result she’s likely one of the most in-demand actresses around which suggests she must be very selective. But that just makes it all the more confusing when she picks some of the projects she does. Aside from voicing a tiger in the two "Kung Fu Panda" movies, the past five years has seen Jolie make six movies. Two were quite good ("A Mighty Heart," "Changeling"), two were not ("Beowulf," "The Tourist") and two were disappointing action movies ("Wanted," "Salt").
The latter, "Salt," made nearly $300 million worldwide and so Columbia Pictures re-hired Kurt Wimmer (who also penned the first film) to begin work on a script for a sequel. Well, Wimmer wrote it, the studio sent it to Angelina for approval, and according to Moviehole, she wasn’t pleased and refused to sign off on it. Oh dear, so what happens now? Well Columbia have asked Wimmer to start over and try to see whether he can come up with something this time that Evelyn Salt will approve of. It all begs the question of whether Angelina ever read the script for the first movie. If she did, then how low are her standards? And how bad is this new script if it doesn’t meet said standards?
Of course, Columbia could always recast the role, or rewrite the sequel with a new character involved (a la Bourne), but then they’d have a hard time attracting anyone with anywhere near as much star power, or who could match Jolie in the female-action department (give Jolie her due, she kicks ass well) at the same time. The fact of the matter is that this is only a franchise with Jolie involved, and she’s the one and only reason the first film made that kind of money in the first place, so they better hope they can produce a decent script soon. Our advice: hire a different writer. If not then we’ve probably got more chance of seeing the blaxploitation spin-off, "Pepper," before "Salt 2" makes its way to theatres.
