Netflix released their latest original film EXTRACTION last Friday and while reviews from critics were mixed, the movie trended over the weekend on Twitter with many praising its innovative action sequences and Chris Hemsworth's performance. Netflix hasn't released hard numbers just yet but I'm going to assume they're going to have another hit on their hands, given that the film topped the streaming charts over the weekend. With a hit comes discussion on if there is more story to tell and it appears there is.
During an interview with "Collider", director Sam Hargrave revealed that himself and writer-producer Joe Russo have discussed the possibility of a sequel or even a prequel to the film. *NOTE: I HAVENT VIEWED THE FILM JUST YET BUT THESE QUOTES COULD CONTAIN SPOILERS SO PROCEED WITH CAUTION.
"We discussed how is [Gaspar] gonna beat [Tyler Rake]. We discussed it and our backstory is that those two guys — and, spoiler alert, who knows whether there could be prequels or sequels could possibly go if Netflix likes the movie —but their backstory is these guys trained together and they spent a lot of time together in the military and even outside of that, in private military sector, and their skills would be matched but they just went in different directions. Harbour[‘s character] ‘went native,’ you might say. He found a life in Bangladesh and stayed there and Rake kept going down that [other] path. But their skillset, if you matched them up, they’re kind of evenly matched. So, to make up for the fact that Rake has been doing [this work] consistently and Harbour[‘s character] has not, we made sure that Chris had enough damage, if he was beaten down enough, we’d believe that Harbour had the skills to take him down."
As the chat rolled along, Hargrave went into more detail about another film, which was actually sparked by Netflix really liking the dailies during filming:
"As soon as it got mentioned, that thought of a sequel — because, I guess, Netflix was enjoying the dailies and things were coming together and people were like, ‘Oh, this could be…’. You know, you talk about all these things. Is it a franchise? Is it all these things? Who knows until the movie comes out and the audience responds. They’ll be the ones who decide. But it was talked about. As soon as it was, Joe brought up an interesting point that most of the time, you get a sequel. Rarely do you go back in time into prequels. […] You get the sense that Chris and Harbour have a great chemistry […] so we thought that was a very interesting way — if you were to go backwards in time — that you could play with the prequel to a story like this."
Definitely looks like the wheels are turning and have been on possibly turning this film into a potential franchise. In the film, Chris Hemsworth plays Tyler Rake, a mercenary-for-hire fighting his way out of Bangladesh as he tries to rescue Ovi Mahajan (Rudhraksh Jaiswal), the kidnapped teenage son of an international crime lord, and get him to safety. Apparently the ending was pretty ambiguous so there are options on the table as to where they could go in a sequel or even tell a story that shows events that establish how the characters came to be. I'm not 100% certain but I don't think Netflix has a viable original franchise on their service so this could be a great launching off pad for them.
Have YOU checked out EXTRACTION? What are YOUR thoughts on a potential sequel or prequel?