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We might have been bored by it, but last year’s The Beekeeper did pretty well on the admittedly forgiving curve of low-budget Jason Statham action movies: Although it had trouble out-maneuvering Mean Girls at the box office, the film—about a former government operative who goes a-killin’ after scammers target one of his friends—still made more than $150 million at the box office. Them’s sequel numbers, apparently, with Deadline reporting that Statham will be returning to the role of highly proficient murder man Adam Clay.
Interestingly, the sequel is facing some shake-ups behind the scenes: David Ayer, who directed the first movie, is apparently busy with his next project, Brad Pitt’s The Heart Of The Beast, and so won’t be coming back to help Statham aim his bees at the evildoers of the world. Instead, the film will be directed by Timo Tjahjanto, who’s also recently been doing “Brought in for the sequel” work for the Bob Odenkirk action follow-up Nobody 2. Action vet Kurt Wimmer, who penned the screenplay for the first movie, will also write this new one.
The Beekeeper was not a complicated movie, essentially being John Wick if, instead of puppy murderers, the retired badass at its center had gone after phishing scammers who target the elderly. The film operated on the basic assumption that you’d like to see Jason Statham say some bee-related words while dispensing very deserved justice to people you were already inclined to hate, and so it’s not hard to imagine a sequel mining similar territory (even if we’re definitely less excited to see Wimmer, who can get a little out of control if you let him, explore a more complicated Apiary mythology than we were when Wick doubled down on its weirder aspects for its sequels).
