Parents just don’t understand… or wait, maybe they totally, really do. Last fall, Papa John Landis revealed that all was not well between Fox and his son/screenwriter/director Max Landis. The kid was working on a script for the sequel to the surprise smash hit “Chronicle,” but apparently suits at the studio didn’t dig it. “He wrote a sequel, and it’s amazing, and the studio read it and said, ‘We want ‘Chronicle’ again!’ And he said, ‘No, this is the sequel, it’s the evolution, and they said ‘No, we want that movie again!’ So it’s difficult, we’re dealing with a difficult business,” Dad Landis said in October. But this spring, Max Landis was all, “My father is not involved in ‘Chronicle 2.’ It was not his place to say that.” Turns out Dad might have seen the writing on the wall a long, long time ago.
It turns out that Max Landis and “Chronicle 2” are done, professionally. “‘Chronicle 2’ is still probably happening, just not with my involvement as of now. It’s a bummer, but there are no real hard feelings,” Landis Jr. tweeted yesterday. It is a bit disappointing that the franchise will continue without the guy who brought the inventiveness that made “Chronicle” feel so fresh in the first place.
So what’s next for “Chronicle 2”? No word yet, but since it’s at Fox, we presume they’ll follow their usual routine of throwing a bunch of writers at it, turning out something bland and then rushing it through production. But hey, we’re willing to be proven wrong. As for original director Josh Trank, he’s busy elsewhere, preparing the “Fantastic Four” reboot for a 2015 release. [The Wrap]