The news broke today that THE NUN director Corin Hardy will be taking the helm of the Cinemax thriller series Gangs of London, which is based on an idea crafted by Gareth Evans, the director of THE RAID and THE RAID 2, and his frequent cinematographer Matt Flannery. The show is expected to premiere on Cinemax sometime in 2019 and is
set in contemporary London as it is being torn apart by power struggles involving several international gangs. The series begins as the head of one criminal gang is assassinated and the power vacuum threatens the fragile peace between the other underworld organizations.
Our own Eric Walkuski recently had the chance to speak with Evans, and during their conversation Evans not only gave some information on what we can expect to see in Gangs of London, he also revealed some details about his idea for THE RAID 3.
Just over a week ago, we heard that Evans didn't intend to make THE RAID 3, even though he knew what the storyline would have been. That remains true, THE RAID 3 is not happening. But if you wondered what we'll be missing out by not getting the sequel, Evans provides the answer to that question:
So when I ruled out The Raid 3, I felt a little bit of a backlash over that. [Laughs] It's really humbling that people want to see it. It's not that I'm turning my back on action. If anything, I'm about to jump back in and embrace it again. We're going to do a 10-part, nine-hour series for Sky Atlantic and HBO/Cinemax, a contemporary action thriller set in London. I've been working with my stunt coordinator for Apostle, we've been designing action sequences for this TV show. It's going to be ten hours worth of various action set-pieces. So I'm going to dive back into that world; it's got some brawling stuff, it's got some gun play, it's got some car chases. A wide spectrum of action we're going to be exploring in this series. So I'm not turning my back on action by any stretch of the imagination. I just feel like, what we did with The Raid and The Raid 2… when Rama says 'I'm done,' that was kind of us saying we were done with it.
I knew what I wanted to do with The Raid 3, I knew what that story was going to be. If I was ever going to make it, it really had to have happened after we made The Raid 2. The storyline was going to pick up – I'll give you a little bit of it – if you were watching The Raid 2 and rewound from the ending about 15-20 minutes back to when Goto gives instructions to his right-hand man to go kill the police, kill the politicians, 'kill everyone that we work with, we're going to start fresh,' that was going to be the first scene of The Raid 3. It was going to be more about the yakuza than it was going to be about Rama; Rama was not really going to feature in that storyline much at all, it was going to be about the bosses in Japan realizing that someone in Jakarta that represented them started to f*ck with the politicians and the police in a country they don't belong in. It was going to be the fallout from that."
It was going to be a 95 minutes, 100 minutes, sort of… escape into the jungles of Indonesia type of thing. But it really needed to be made at that period of time. Four years, five years later to go back and try to recreate that, it felt a bit disingenuous. I made three martial arts films in a row, I wanted to explore other things first. It was always a cool idea, but it stopped being really special for me. The Raid, it gave me an awful lot that I'm very appreciative about, but that adventure is kind of over now."
I'm okay with THE RAID staying a two film series, something doesn't have to have RAID in the title for it to be an awesome Gareth Evans action project. I'm very much looking forward to seeing what he'll be bringing us in the future, including Gangs of London and his Netflix movie APOSTLE.