Shyamalan says The Horde from Split was originally in Unbreakable

Next weekend M. Night Shyamalan will get to unleash the conclusion to his superhero-thriller series with GLASS. The previous movie in the trilogy, SPLIT, was the sequel to 2000’s UNBREAKABLE no one thought we would ever get given that film didn’t make the SIXTH SENSE money the studio was hoping for. Chances are he would’ve made a franchise out of it much sooner had it made more, as the director revealed in a new interview he always had the idea for the series, having originally included The Horde from SPLIT into UNBREAKABLE.

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Shyamalan has been on the promotion trail for GLASS, talking about this very unexpected take on the superhero saga and whether it was something he had been wanting to do since 2000. Though he didn’t get to release SPLIT until 2017, Shyamalan told Vulture that he always intended for SPLIT to be the sequel, including the villainous character (played by James McAvoy) in an early draft of the script for UNBREAKABLE.

That was always the idea. Originally Unbreakable and Split were together. David and the Horde bump into each other at the train station, and David follows him.

However, he had to take it out for the sake of not distracting from the main story around Bruce Willis’ character, David Dunn (returning for GLASS).

It’s a narrative issue. Whenever you raise the stakes, you can’t unraise them. So once you introduce girls being abducted, there’s a ticking clock that doesn’t allow for the breadth of character development that I wanted to do in Unbreakable with David, his wife, and his kid.

Whether GLASS is as good as its predecessors or not, the movie was made with a small enough budget ($20 million), that it’s destined to be successful based on the opening weekend projections alone (around $50-70 million, currently). In an age of franchises that means a fourth movie could happen should Shyamalan want it – but that’s the thing – he doesn’t.

Yeah, but that’s not interesting to me. There’s no danger in that. Or not enough danger, let’s say that.

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He continued, saying even he doesn’t know how Marvel handles such a big universe, and that as of now he’s not planning on doing any more movies in this series after GLASS. In fact, he says he owns the sequel rights to all of his movies, “essentially for the reason to not do them.”

The rest of the interview is a very illuminating discussion about this new trajectory of the director's career, starting with how SPLIT got made on the success of THE VISIT, a $100 million movie made on the budget of $5 million – which Shyamalan put up himself. In regards to the history of The Horde, one can only wonder what UNBREAKABLE would have been like had the character been included, and how it would've affected these new movies. He made the right call in cutting it, though, as it would've been too big a plot element to not address later, which would've cluttered things up. But now we have the story in place, and hopefully, it comes to a rousing conclusion with GLASS next weekend. 

GLASS is in theaters January 18.