With a $20 million budget secured, a spring production locked in, and locations being scouted in Atlanta by director Steven C. Miller, a sequel to the 2013 "Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger team up to break out of prison" film ESCAPE PLAN is very close to becoming a reality.
There's still no solid word on whether or not Schwarzenegger will be appearing in the sequel, but Stallone is back for sure, and he just got a trio of co-stars.
The casting news led off with the announcement that Dave Bautista is taking a role in ESCAPE PLAN 2. A former wrestler, Bautista has recently had massive success playing the character Drax in GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY and fighting James Bond in SPECTRE. This ESCAPE PLAN film will actually be the second time Stallone and Bautista are both credited on a feature, as Stallone has a mystery role in GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2.
Also joining the cast are Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson, returning as his tech specialist character Hush from the first ESCAPE PLAN (pictured above), and genre regular Jaime King, who previously worked with Miller on the SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT remake SILENT NIGHT.
Details on ESCAPE PLAN 2's plot are being kept under wraps. The script has been written by Miles Chapman, who co-wrote the first movie.
Directed by Mikael Håfström, the first ESCAPE PLAN had the following synopsis:
One of the world's foremost authorities on structural security agrees to take on one last job: breaking out of an ultra-secret, high-tech facility called "The Tomb." Deceived and wrongly imprisoned, Ray Breslin (Sylvester Stallone) must recruit fellow inmate Emil Rottmayer (Arnold Schwarzenegger) to help devise a daring, nearly impossible plan to escape from the most protected and fortified prison ever built.
ESCAPE PLAN 2 is being produced by Randall Emmett, George Furla, Mark Canton, Zack Schiller, Robbie Brenner, and Jie Qiu. Ted Fox, Mark Stewart, Barry Brooker, Stan Wertlieb, and The Fyzz Facility's Wayne Marc Godfrey and Robert Jones serve as executive producers.
Jaime King