A new fighter has entered the ring to direct Road House 2 after Doug Liman’s public feud with Amazon MGM Studios over the original’s streaming release.
Guy Ritchie is taking over as director for a Road House sequel, Entertainment Weekly has confirmed.
Jake Gyllenhaal will return to produce and star in the new movie about his character, former UFC fighter-turned-bouncer Dalton, based on Patrick Swayze’s 1989 classic with a script written by Will Beall (Bad Boys: Ride or Die, Aquaman).
So far, plot details are being kept under wraps, and the sequel could literally go anywhere after Dalton left the Florida Keys and his job as a bouncer behind at the end of the first movie; meanwhile, a mid-credits scene revealed psychotic enforcer Knox (Conor McGregor) somehow survived his fight with Dalton, and escaped the hospital in nothing but a flimsy gown.
While it’s unclear whether McGregor’s Knox will return, fans can definitely expect a lot of bone-crunching action for Gyllenhaal’s ruthless vagabond with a penchant for Hawaiian shirts.
The Road House sequel was previously announced last May, less than two months after the movie’s release. But even then, Liman was not expected to return as director. His 2024 remake was a huge streaming success on Prime Video with over 80 million viewers, making it Amazon MGM’s most-watched film debut ever on a worldwide basis. But the director had an intense public feud with Amazon over the film not getting a theatrical release, resulting in him boycotting the film’s premiere.
“Amazon is hurting way more than just me and my film,” Liman said in a statement published on Deadline in January 2024, ahead of the film’s SXSW opening. “If I don’t speak up about Amazon, who will?”
The director, whose other projects include The Bourne Identity and Edge of Tomorrow, called out the contradictions between Amazon’s statements and its actions, noting that when the company bought MGM — the studio that initially greenlit Liman’s project — it insisted that it was committed to releasing movies in cinemas, not just on streaming.
“Contrary to their public statements, Amazon has no interest in supporting cinemas,” Liman said at the time. “Amazon asked me and the film community to trust them and their public statements about supporting cinemas, and then they turned around and are using Road House to sell plumbing fixtures.”
amazon studios
Jake Gyllenhaal in ‘Road House’
The director believed that his Road House remake missed out on its potential to make bank at the box office.
“Road House tested higher than my biggest box office hit, Mr. and Mrs Smith. It tested higher than Bourne Identity, which spawned four sequels,” he said. “I’m told the press response has been Amazon’s best since they bought MGM. Road House has a strong tie-in to the UFC, which has a rabid and loyal fan base that has spawned over 1.5 billion social media impressions for the film, and marketing hasn’t even started yet.”
Liman also pointed out that the cast and crew of the movie won’t share in the back-end profits of the film since it won’t make money without a theatrical release, and that Gyllenhaal wasn’t eligible during awards season due to rules about streaming releases despite it being a “career-defining performance in a role he was born to play.”
“But the impact goes far beyond this one movie,” he continued. “This could be industry shaping for decades to come. If we don’t put tentpole movies in movie theaters, there won’t be movie theaters in the future. Movies like Road House, people actually want to see on the big screen, and it was made for the big screen. Without movie theaters, we won’t have the commercial box office hits that are the locomotives that allow studios to take gambles on original movies and new directors. Without movie theaters we won’t have movie stars.”
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Liman concluded his statement by noting there “may not be a human villain in this story — it may simply be an Amazon computer algorithm.”
“Amazon will sell more toasters if it has more subscribers; it will have more subscribers if it doesn’t have to compete with movie theaters,” he said. “A computer could come up with that elegant solution as easily as it could solve global warming by killing all humans. But a computer doesn’t know what it is like to share the experience of laughing and cheering and crying with a packed audience in a dark theater – and if Amazon has its way, future audiences won’t know either.”
Road House 2 will reunite Ritchie and Gyllenhaal, who previously worked together on Guy Ritchie’s the Covenant.
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