The battle may be won, but “The Tomorrow War” continues.
A week after the time-traveling alien invasion thriller premiered on Amazon Prime Video, Amazon Studios and Skydance are already in talks to produce a sequel to the film. The current plan is for director Chris McKay, screenwriter Zach Dean, and stars Chris Pratt, Yvonne Strahovski, Sam Richardson, Betty Gilpin, Edwin Hodge and J.K. Simmons to all return for a second go around, but no cast deals are done yet.
“The Tomorrow War” was originally set to open in theaters from Paramount Pictures, but the pandemic ultimately forced the studio and Skydance to sell the film to Amazon for a reported $200 million, as Variety reported exclusively. The film debuted on Prime Video on July 2 in over 240 countries, and various third-party viewership companies reported high ratings for the movie, with Screen Engine’s PostVOD claiming it was the top feature film on streaming platforms over the holiday weekend. Amazon has not made any viewership numbers public.
The prospect of a sequel to “The Tomorrow War” is tricky to discuss, given the nature of the film’s story, so consider this a warning that there are spoilers in the following paragraph. In the film, Pratt and Richardson play Dan and Charlie, who travel 30 years into the future to help fight a losing war against an onslaught of ravenous aliens called White Spikes. While in the future, Dan meets his grown daughter, Muri (Strahovski), who develops a poison that could effectively wipe out the White Spikes. When Dan is zapped back to the present day, he takes the poison with him. He and Charlie locate the buried alien ship containing the first White Spikes — which crashed on Earth at least 1,000 years earlier — in the Russian Arctic, and with Dan’s estranged father (Simmons), Dan, Charlie and a small platoon of volunteer soldiers discover the ship and realize the alien pilots were intelligent beings, and the White Spikes were some kind of cargo. They destroy the ship and kill all the aliens inside — supposedly ending the war before it started.
Popular on Variety
A sequel would suggest that, perhaps, they didn’t. In an interview with Variety before the debut of “The Tomorrow War,” McKay said he was eager to return to the world of the film and further explore where the White Spikes originated.
“We talked about the world of these creatures, where they came from, how they were created or raised, and how they were maybe being used,” he said. “I think that a sequel could go in a lot of fun areas and the ethnographic study of the White Spikes in their world and where they came from, and what their purpose was, and all of that kind of thing. So yeah, I think that could be a lot of fun. And with this cast, too, we’re just getting started.”
Deadline first reported news of the sequel talks.