Merrick here...


A while back, in an AICN post I'm unable to track down at the moment, I mentioned that the next Riddick movie...if there is a next Riddick movie...would be somewhat downsized and more closely evoke PITCH BLACK than 2004's sprawling & mythologically complex CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK. A few hostile e-mails and snarky Talkbacks later, it became clear that many people didn't understand what I was talking about. Maybe this'll clear things up a bit.

ShockTillYouDrop recently had a brief discussion with PITCH BLACK/CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK writer/director David Twohy, who elaborated on how he & Vin would approach/are approaching a third feature film in the cross-platform RIDDICK franchise.

"The third movie would be more modestly-scaled and it would probably feel more like 'Pitch Black' then 'Chronicles'," he continued. "It will always be Riddick-centric. If the question is whether it will be more like the first one than the second one, the difference is that yeah, you can sell it on its creatures and say 'This is a creature fest and we're going to go out as us vs. the creatures' but that's like a lot of different movies. However, the hallmark of a good movie, and I think 'Pitch Black' is a good movie, is that even if you took the creatures out of the picture, you'd still have some pretty interesting character dynamics going on within that group, and it's almost like you can tell the same story without the creature or substitute some other external pressure on the group, because there were internal pressures as well that were interesting. So was it really a creature feature? It had the hallmarks of it, the trappings of a creature movie, but it also had pretty good characters."

...said Twohy in THIS CHAT with ShockTillYouDrop.

Several years ago, Vin suggested that a third Riddick film would expand on the "Underverse" metaphysics on which the second film's antagonists hinged their shenanigans. No word on if Twohy and Diesel are still heading that direction.