Netflix is going hard on Rebel Moon, a new sci-fi franchise about a young woman (Sofia Boutella) who takes a stand against a tyrannical galactic empire. What began as director Zack Snyder's pitch for a Star Wars film kicked off this past December with Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire, which got decent viewership but bad reviews from critics and mixed reviews from audiences. The follow-up movie, Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver, drops on Netflix tomorrow. But if you thought that would be the end of it, you are mistaken; screenwriter Kurt Johnstad, who wrote the movies alongside Snyder and Shay Hatten, told Screenrant that they have plans for six movies in this "trilogy."
Let's address the elephant in the room first: "trilogy" means three and six means...six. So how do you have a trilogy with six movies? "hen I say six movies, it's really a trilogy with each movie being two parts," Johnstad explained. "That’s how we’re thinking of it now."
"Netflix is interested, and we’re waiting to see how these first movies go. But there is certainly a treatment for three and four. We’ve laid out very detailed… All we have to do is start writing. Actually, Zack has already started writing because he’s like that. I think he’s already written the first thirty pages of movie three. So once we get the green light to start writing, if that happens, it’ll happen fairly quickly because Shay (Hatten), Zack, and I are pretty fast. And we’ve done all the work. It’s not like, “Well, what about this.” We know exactly what we need to do."
Again, Netflix has conceived of Rebel Moon as a franchise, not just a movie, so it's not shocking to hear that Johnstad and company have expansive plans, although I don't know if they needed to stretch the word "trilogy" quite so far to express them. How about using the word "hexalogy" instead? That word's not used very often; that could be fun.
But whether the franchise gets that far is contingent on how many people watch Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver. And given that there seems to be less hype going into this sequel than there was going into the first movie, more sequels don't seem like a sure thing. "Our ambition and what we want to give the fans don’t always match up with the reality of the world's economy," Johnstad acknowledged. "But that’s what we want to do. We want to give fans six movies or a trilogy in two parts each."
"What we want to give the fans always match upw the reality of the world's economy" seems to be a flattering way of saying, "If no one watches our movie, it's not worth it for Netflix to spend more money on sequels." So whether the economy is in line with the goals of the filmmakers is up to you. Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver drops on April 19.
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