Although I certainly enjoyed M. Night Shyamalan's UNBREAKABLE upon its release, it would take several more viewings before it would became my favourite of Shyamalan's films. It was also the only one of the director's films which demanded a sequel, and although there was initially some interest in pursuing a follow-up, UNBREAKABLE didn't perform well enough for the studio to green-light another. That was that, but after Shyamalan turned SPLIT into a secret UNBREAKABLE sequel, the stage was set for the return of David Dunn (Bruce Willis) and Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson) in GLASS.
Both James McAvoy and Anya Taylor-Joy will be returning as Kevin Wendell Crumb and Casey Cooke respectively, and the sequel will find David Dunn pursuing Crumb’s superhuman figure of The Beast in a series of escalating encounters, while the shadowy presence of Price emerges as an orchestrator who holds secrets critical to both men. Samuel L. Jackson recently spoke with Vulture about GLASS where he revealed that Elijah Price will finally be getting everything he wanted after eighteen years – a super-hero showdown.
All of a sudden, my character has the thing he wanted: the heroic good guy, the bad guy, and I get to be in the middle of them. It has a distinct satisfaction if you remember what his theory was all along, that there are people out here with extraordinary powers who can do extraordinary things. And it’s amazing to watch James have an argument with four different characters in front of my face.
Like many of us, Samuel L. Jackson had no idea that SPLIT was an UNBREAKABLE sequel, but M. Night Shyamalan called the actor up before the film was released and requested that he watch it. "I remember when Night called me last year to say, ‘I need you to watch this movie I just made, and after you watch it, I’ll tell you what I’m thinking.’ So I watched Split, and at the end of it, we get Bruce in the café and the woman talks to him about Mr. Glass," Jackson said. "I was like, ‘So are we gonna make this movie?’ And Night says, 'Well, it depends on the opening weekend.'" The first trailer for GLASS which our own Editor-in-Chief Paul Shirey caught at CinemaCon earlier this year found not just Samuel L. Jackson's character in an institution, but also James McAvoy and Bruce Willis' characters, where they're being treated as people who are convinced that they’re superheroes. GLASS is set for a January 18, 2019 release.