Gerard Butler's Has Fallen Series Is Moving To TV, Fourth Movie Still In The Works
It would appear that the King of Modern Trash Cinema™ is on his way to becoming the King of Modern Trash Shared Universes: Deadline is reporting that Gerard Butler's "Has Fallen" franchise is headed to the small screen, even as a fourth movie centered on Butler's Secret Service Agent Mike Banning continues to move forward.
The Scottish thespian and "300" actor — whose many, many B-movie credits include "Law Abiding Citizen," "Den of Thieves," and this year's marvelously-titled "Plane" — made his debut as Banning in Antoine Fuqua's "Olympus Has Fallen." Fuqua's modestly-successful action flick pitted Banning, a U.S. government agent haunted by a past failure on the job, against a North Korean-backed attack on the White House, making it one of two "Die Hard" riffs set in the Oval Office that released in 2013 (with the other being Roland Emmerich's arguably superior "White House Down").
Butler would return as Banning in 2016's brazenly Islamophobic "London Has Fallen" before suiting up once more in 2019's "Angel Has Fallen," a "Fugitive"-styled sequel that sees a wrongly-accused Banning on the run and might be the best film in the franchise so far. It also features a comedic post-credits scene that clashes bizarrely with the rest of the movie, much of which is tonally pretty serious and focuses on the wear and tear Banning has accumulated from a lifetime of battling terrorist threats.
Moving on — despite Banning retiring from field work and being promoted to Director of the Secret Service at the end of "Angel," a fourth film titled "Night Has Fallen" is apparently still in the works. Moreover, Deadline is hearing that Butler could cameo on the TV show spinoff, which is currently titled "Paris Has Fallen" and is set to star French actor/filmmaker Mathieu Kassovitz of "Amélie" fame.
Welcome to the Butler-verse
"Misfits" creator Howard Overman is writing "Paris Has Fallen," with StudioCanal and Urban Myth Films (the 2019 "War of the Worlds" TV show) joining forces with Gerard Butler's G-Base and Millennium Media (which are also behind the "Has Fallen" movies) to back the series. Here's how Deadline describes the show:
[Mathieu] Kassovitz will star as Vincent, a protection officer to a French Minister, who is the target of a terror group led by villain Jacob. Vincent works with MI6 operative Zara to keep the politician safe, but they eventually unravel a wider plot, suspecting that a security service colleague is feeding information to Jacob, who is always a step ahead in his mission to bring down Paris.
StudioCanal is planning to shop the eight-episode show to U.S. and UK buyers in the months to come, with filming set to take place in London and Paris starting on May 30, 2023. (Writers strike? What writers strike?) Butler actually filed a lawsuit over profits he claims he was owed from "Olympus Has Fallen" back in July 2021, but it seems that's not stopping the man from continuing to work on the "Has Fallen" franchise. He's also got sequels to "Den of Thieves" and his 2020 disaster film "Greenland" in development, and I honestly wouldn't rule out the idea of him reprising his animated role as Stoick for the live-action "How to Train Your Dragon" remake.
Say what you will about Butler and his art, but you gotta respect the hustle. Case in point: Butler will return later this month when his latest action/thriller, "Kandahar," hits theaters on May 26, 2023.