Alita: Battle Angel slipped in these famous actors to prepare for a sequel

Alita: Battle Angel came out this past weekend. The movie, based on the manga by Yukito Kishiro, is a splashy action hit about a cyborg (Rosa Salazar) who wakes up bereft of her memories in a post-apocalyptic cyberpunk city and slowly rediscovers her original purpose. Directed by Robert Rodriguez and conceived by James “What Aquaman did isn’t art” Cameron, Alita has been a long time coming. So did it meet expectations?

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Sort of. Audiences liked it, critics thoughts it was fine, and It’s done just okay at the box office. There’s still time, but in today’s Hollywood, where studios want Avengers-style returns, that may not be enough to get the movie a sequel.

However, Rodriguez definitely wants one, and even hired some pretty big-name actors to play minor roles with the hope that they’ll have meatier parts in the follow-up(s). Namely, we’re talking about Jai Courtney as Jashugan, a motorball champion; Michelle Rodriguez as Gelda, the cyborg we see training Alita in a couple flashbacks; and the big one, Edward Norton as villainous mastermind Nova, who builds a lot of the baddies Alita fights.

We don’t see any of those people for more than a few moments, but Rodriguez thought is crucial they be included. “You had to get a sense if she had been trained before by scenes with the Michelle character, you had to see Gelda at some point,” he told ComingSoon.net. “They’re talking about how the game is played, Jashugin is one of the major players. He has a much bigger role later in the books.”

"We had to cast three people without really having a part for them to be basing it on to see if they wanted to do it. There was no script for a future one…It’s the promise of a part if there is a sequel, there might not be. If there is a sequel, you don’t want to be roped into something that you’re not going to like, but they knew us enough to trust that we’d make sure it was something cool."

Anyone else see Alita? I thought it was a little clunky, story-wise, but it was wildly imaginative, had appealing performances and looked fantastic. I’m a little tired of all the sequels out there but if Hollywood is going to have one, it might as well be for a movie like this, which takes place in a world we’re not yet tired of.

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h/t The A.V. Club