Anthony and Joe Russo (Avengers: Infinity War) had a virtual panel to themselves last weekend at the Comic-Con Experience in Brazil, one of the largest pop-culture conventions in the world. In addition to talking about their future projects, like next year's science fiction film Everything Everywhere All at Once, the Russos mentioned that they're working on not just a sequel to their Netflix original film Extraction, but a full "universe of films" set within the same storyline.
Extraction, a remarkably gory hostage-rescue action movie starring Chris Hemsworth (world-famous Thor cosplayer) and written by Joe Russo, premiered on Netflix in April to middling reviews but immediate success. While it did have a lot of irreproducible benefits at the time, like showing up in exactly the right window to get clicks from stir-crazy Americans in pandemic lockdown, Extraction quickly became the most-watched original movie in Netflix's history.
A sequel was later greenlit, although little more was said about it in public until the CCXP panel. There still isn't a lot of information, but Joe Russo confirmed that the plan is for Chris Hemsworth to return for another run as sad Australian mercenary Tyler Rake. Given Hemsworth's busy schedule, such as filming Thor: Love and Thunder early next year, it's likely that he won't be able to start work on Extraction 2 until the fall of 2021.
Russo also talked about his interest in expanding Extraction into a franchise, which would explore some of the side characters from the first film, as well as go into their various histories together. A specific example given during the panel was the idea of a film that showed the story of the partnership between Hemsworth's Rake and David Harbour's Gaspar. The characters' history together was only hinted at in Extraction, but Gaspar is a textbook one-scene wonder. It's obvious prequel bait.
It's not quite as crazy an idea as it might sound. If Extraction has one innovative quality about it, it's that Hemsworth's character is really only the co-protagonist. Randeep Hooda's Saju, the antagonist's primary henchman, gets a comparable amount of screen time to Hemsworth and is just about as important in the overall narrative. If the idea behind a universe of Extraction films is, as Russo says, to explore a typical 21st-century bloody urban combat movie from multiple character perspectives at once, then it's a more interesting exercise than just making a billion excuses to show Chris Hemsworth punching dudes.
The Russo brothers' next project to arrive is the crime drama Cherry, based on the semi-autobiographical novel of the same name by Nico Walker, starring Tom Holland as a war veteran who resorts to bank robbery in order to pay for his growing opioid addiction. After a theatrical run beginning on February 26th, 2021, Cherry is scheduled to premiere on VOD via Apple TV on March 12th.
Source: Collider