Neil Marshall Discusses The 'Doomsday' Sequel We'll Never See
Doomsday is the only movie director Neil Marshall has made with a sequel in mind. Unfortunately, we're never going to see that sequel. We've known that since the film underperformed at the box office in 2008. The Descent and Game of Thrones director thankfully got to stuff a lot of ideas in the first Doomsday, a movie that proudly wears its influences on its sleeve, but there was an idea or two he was saving for a Doomsday 2.
Below, learn what Marshall had in mind for a Doomsday sequel.
This past weekend the Cinefamily Theater hosted a Doomsday screening and Q & A with Marshall and actress Nora Jane-Noone (The Descent). The film played great. Fans were cheering and often cackling. The crowd even went nuts for Marshall's close-up of an exploding rabbit (one of the movie's most difficult shots).
Marshall's action movie placed Major Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra) in post-apocalyptic Scotland, which was torn apart by the deadly Reaper virus. Sinclair, whose mother presumably died trying to get her to safety, was one of the final few to evacuate — before a wall was completed to keep Scottland's citizens quarantined. Years later, when the virus appears in London, Sinclair is sent back home to find survivors and secure a cure.
According to Marshall, Doomsday 2 would've revealed Sinclair's mother survived the virus:
I had an idea for a part two. There was a sequence involving helicopter gunships attacking the castle [from the third act], which I knew I couldn't properly do for this one. I thought, Oh, I'll save that for the next one. I should've used for that [first] one. [Laughs] The story was going to involve our hero character, Sinclair, ending up in Newcastle upon Tyne, my hometown. There's a border town, and she discovers her mom is still alive and running her own kind of gang there. She's gone a bit fucking mental as well. Beyond that, I haven't really thought about it.
Marshall joked maybe he could scrap together bread crumbs from Europe to make the sequel, but he's long since moved on. He definitely hasn't forgotten the importance of Doomsday, though. "I learned a s*** load from the failure of this film," the writer-director said. "More than any other film." He remains fond of his bloody, often crazy, and surprisingly funny action movie, which features an exceptionally cool hero who gets some standout scenes with the late Bob Hoskins.