There was a time a half-decade ago when cameras nearly rolled on a sequel to David Cronenberg‘s gangster tale “Eastern Promises.” Viggo Mortensen and Vincent Cassel were attached to star, with a script by Steven Knight, but Focus Features yanked the plug on the movie in 2012 and that was pretty much the last we heard about it. But the project has resurfaced.
My Entertainment World has posted a spring production start date in London for the “Eastern Promises” sequel, which now apparently boasts the title “Body Cross,” and even comes with a synopsis:
Picking up where the 2007 film left off with the incompetent underboss Kirill thinking that he and his henchman driver Nikolai really have inherited the throne from his crime-lord father, without knowing that Nikolai is actually a clandestine agent working undercover in Russia’s federal security service.
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The story details sound about right given that when we talked to Cronenberg a few years back, he shared that he wanted Nikolai to return to his native land.
“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. In other words you experience their exile and they are trying to recreate some of Russia within London,” Cronenberg explained in 2012. “In the original screenplay there were some scenes in Russia and I thought it was better if we don’t see that — they long for Russia but we never see that.
“In the sequel, we would see Nikolai go to Russia and there would be Russian elements and so on and so on,” he added, noting, “As far as I’m concerned I’m not involved anymore.”
Whether or not Cronenberg circled back to the movie is just one of the many questions that are waiting to be answered. But I wouldn’t get your hopes up too quickly — My Entertainment world also posited early last year that “Avatar 2” would start shooting in April 2016….and that clearly didn’t happen…. [Little White Lies]