Update: Shyamalan has confirmed that the film, Glass, will open on January 18, 2019, with Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, James McAvoy, and Anya Taylor-Joy all returning.
Talk of an Unbreakable sequel is now as old as or older than the majority of America’s high-school students, so you’d be forgiven for reading the above headline and thinking something, anything along the lines of, “Sure thing, dude,” before moving on. It doesn’t help that the M. Night Shyamalanaissance might only be obvious with the release of his latest feature, Split, a box-office smash that’s earning strong reviews, and rightfully so — it’s one of his best films, period, photographed with more liveliness than perhaps anything he’s made and so engaged with the possible pleasures of storytelling that even the most jaded viewer should be taken by at least one scene or idea.
Let’s present this upfront before those who wish to see Split, but haven’t yet done so, might want to plug their ears and turn away: speaking to Uproxx, Shyamalan announced that an Unbreakable sequel will probably be his next film. Have you read that, not seen Split, and still wish to catch it before it’s out of theaters? All right! You’ve got the news! Take care.
…if you have seen the film, you know there’s sufficient reason to believe the writer-director, given that it ends with the revelation that what we’ve seen takes place in the same universe as Unbreakable — confirmed by the brief return of Bruce Willis‘ own David Dunn, and suggesting a meet-up between him and James McAvoy‘s villainous Kevin Wendell Crumb. (Coming out of the theater, I had a nice chuckle realizing the play between the films’ titles.) Shyamalan thus hopes to make “the final movie of these two movies put together,” and suggested that Samuel L. Jackson‘s Mr. Glass, referenced by name in the final scene, would also appear.
What happens next seems like a mystery to the filmmaker himself, as indicated by comments made in an interview with Entertainment Weekly:
I don’t know what’s going to happen when I go off in my room, a week after this film opens, to write the script. But I’m going to start writing.
Do you have an outline?
Yeah, definitely. A really robust outline, which is pretty intricate. But now the standards for my outlines are higher. I need to know I’ve won already. I’m almost there but I’m not quite there.