'Edge Of Tomorrow 2' Picks Up Right Where Part One Left Off

No, you're not dreaming. An Edge of Tomorrow sequel-prequel might actually happen. It still almost sounds too good to be true, but three years after the spectacular first movie came out, director Doug Liman is working on a follow-up that'll bring back Bill Cage (Tom Cruise) and Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt). Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse wrote the Live Die Repeat and Repeat script (yes, that's the title), which has more comedy, less battlefield action, and a new character Liman says will "steal the movie." And interesting, he notes that the sequel will pick up right where the first movie ended.

Below, the director, who's making Chaos Walking next, discusses the Edge of Tomorrow sequel that, in our book, can't get made soon enough.

Unlike the first movie, Live Die Repeat and Repeat won't be a war movie. "It's mostly not on the battlefield, so there's a whole new arena of fights we're going to be using a lot of the technology, but also, because it is a prequel, it's a lot of the precursor stuff," Liman said on the Happy Sad Confused (via Collider) podcast as he promoted The Wall.

The director also explained why the sequel would be "small" for more than just monetary reasons:

I think what people tend to do with sequels is they just make them bigger. And I'm like, 'No, a sequel should be smaller.' You did the first film as sort of the ad campaign for the sequel, so now you don't need as much action, and in the case of Edge of Tomorrow, people obviously loved the comedy and they loved the situation ... so we can do way more focus on Tom's character and Emily Blunt's character, and there's a third character in the sequel that's gonna for sure steal the movie. We can focus on that. I don't need an action sequence every two minutes.

Liman added Live Die Repeat and Repeat – which honestly isn't the most alluring title – will complete a "two movie-franchise":

I see this as a two-movie franchise; there's the completion of the story we set up in the first movie and the relationships between Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt – because, remember, at the end of the first movie, she doesn't know who he is – and that's gonna launch us into an amazing new direction. It does pick up right where we left off, but it doesn't keep going forward because we'd screw with time, because the aliens screwed with time.

He went on to say he wants to get more into the nuts and bolts of the world, like how the suits operate, in addition to amping up the humor. Liman and writer Christopher McQuarrie approached the first movie as a comedy, which is why it had a happy ending. Even more of that sense of humor and interplay between Blunt and Cruise is more than welcome in Live Die Repeat and Repeat.

Liman's next film, American Made, opens in theaters September 29.