There are many films that should never have had a sequel, since then it became clear that they were nothing more than a simple commercial operation to take advantage of the good taste left by the first installment. However, there are also a very small number of feature films that really left you wanting a sequel that we never got to see. ‘The Italian Job’ is one of those rare exceptions.
This remake of the 1969 British film of the same title hit theaters in 2003 and did quite well at the box office, earning $176 million when it had only cost $60. paramount shortly after launched a second installment that was going to be titled ‘The Brazilian Job’but soon things began to get complicated and the project never got off the ground.
The problems came too soon
Paramount’s first move was to redirect a script written by david twohy (‘Pitch Black’) so that it could work as a sequel to ‘The Italian Job’. If you are curious to see what it was like, here it is available, since many years later it ended up leaking online. By then, only a true miracle would have helped ‘The Brazilian Job’ to get ahead.
What has happened? The first and most important thing of all is that there were several changes in the Paramount executive, such as that Sherry Lansingwho had been the president of the studio since 1992, left the company at the end of 2004. That led to the first delays, since it was initially announced that ‘The Brazilian Job’ would hit theaters at the end of 2005.
In addition, the script did not finish convincing the studio, so there were different versions, thus complicating the future of this sequel, since Mark Wahlberg He did not hesitate to affirm the following in an interview granted in 2005 to MTV:
Everything revolves around the script. Now I only make movies that I want to see, or that I think people want to see me in. A lot of people really liked ‘The Italian Job’, and a lot of sequels don’t measure up to the original, so we want to make it as good or better than the original.
By then, the tentative date for the premiere of ‘The Brazilian Job’ had already passed to 2007 and they worked on new versions of the script to see if they hit the key. This was not the case and the film ended in the dreaded development hell, which led to Seth Green already revealed in 2007 that “I’ve read two drafts of the script in the last four years, and neither of them got the green light, so it’s really a Paramount problem. I guess since the Paramount hierarchy has changed hands four times since we made that movie, it’s gotten a bit lost in the shuffle.“.
For his part, Jason Statham he commented the following year that “I think someone should remove it from IMDb. Save us all trouble, and put it back there when it’s fully done. I don’t know. It’s one of those things that’s out there“It seemed that by then all the protagonists had turned the page and were focused on new projects, but the producer Donald DeLine gave some hope in 2009:
We are trying it right now. Everyone wants to do the sequel. We have a version at Paramount that we’re talking very seriously about, so hopefully next year we’ll be able to do it. They’re all very successful and very busy, which is great, but they all have a real love and passion for that movie, so they want to come back and do another one, which is great. We look forward to meeting you.
Already in 2010, Wahlberg assured that ‘The Brazilian Job’ had been reactivated, but we never heard from her again. Well, I lie, the fact that Paramount announced the launch of a television series of ‘The Italian Job’ already in 2016 basically confirmed that the sequel had been shelved.
Of course, this version for the small screen was not made either, and it seems that the exact same thing is going to happen with the television sequel to the original film from 1969 that received the green light in 2021 from Paramount+, since we haven’t heard from her for two years.
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