” ‘Crank 3‘ is going to happen. The studios are really excited about it — it’s just all about timing,” director Mark Neveldine proclaimed in 2011, but seven years later there has been absolutely no movement on that front. The sad fact is that while “Crank” and “Crank: High Voltage” occupied a weird part of the pop culture conversation between 2006 and 2009, by time the second movie rolled out, the allure of Jason Statham essentially killing himself to stay alive started to wear out. The series co-director Brian Taylor is now much more candid about how things played out.
“The prospects for ‘Crank 3’ would be much improved if the second movie had made more than $12 at the box office,” he told The Movie Crypt podcast. “So there really isn’t like a ‘Fast & Furious‘ financial incentive to do it, right? So, it’s got to be a great idea. It’s got to be everybody on the same page and passionate about doing something insane. My feeling about ‘Crank 3’ is that ‘Crank 3’ should be as exponentially more f—ed up than ‘Crank 2’ as ‘Crank 2’ was ‘Crank 1.’ Obviously, there’s been talk here and there but I’ve never really felt that creatively it was f—ed up enough to really do. Because the studio will get in contact with us: ‘What do you guys think about this?’ ‘What do you guys think about that?’ And the scenarios are always very tame compared to what I think it should be.”
Still, Taylor has faith that a great concept for another movie will emerge, and even more, he believes the franchise can get much, much, much bigger.
“Obviously, there’s a great movie there somewhere,” Taylor said. “I don’t know if it’s going to be Jason Statham in a wheelchair, 40 years from now. I think there should be a Crank cinematic universe. Not just one movie. So who knows? There’s nothing in the works right now. But you never know. Me and Mark are brothers for life.”
It sounds crazy, but with every studio around town trying to franchise anything they can, including catalog titles, a “Crank”-iverse doesn’t seem so impossible. [via JoBlo]