Meg 2: The Trench Director Ben Wheatley Wanted Every Dollar Of The Budget On Screen
Can we all just take a step back and appreciate how truly bonkers it is that Ben Wheatley made a sequel to "The Meg?" Ben "Kill List" Wheatley? Ben "High-Rise" Wheatley? It's one of the most fascinating leaps from the realm of weird indie movies to studio filmmaking we've seen in recent memory. I like a good bit of escapism as much as the next guy, but I still did a double take when the dude who was known for making pitch-black movies seemingly built to avoid being traditional crowd-pleasers signed on to make the next Jason-Statham-Punching-Prehistoric-Sharks movie.
So, while it was a surprise to me that this was the big-budget franchise he jumped to, what I'm not surprised about is the word that not only is Wheatley embracing the absurdity of this franchise, he's doing so by taking the filmmaking part of it very seriously. In the recent issue of Total Film, Wheatley reveals that he was very eager to avoid a common big-budget pitfall by spending the downtime forced upon him by Covid to plan his sequel to the Nth degree. As he said:
"By the time I got to 'The Meg,' I'd done a lot of effects work, and I had an inkling of it. And because of the pandemic, I had an extra six or seven months, so I storyboarded the whole thing, every frame of it. So when we came to start it, there was a massive amount of prep that had been done. I don't like the idea of these tales of people making it up on the day. I wanted every dollar on screen."
Less waste means more absurdly giant shark action
While that approach seems like the logical one and the way movies were made for decades, in terms of modern studio filmmaking it's oddly not the norm. Superhero movies in particular are known for finding their films in reshoots (this was going on when they were mostly winners, even before their current slump), which is part of the reason why budgets have ballooned so much. It costs a lot to spend multiple months reshooting. Sometimes it saves the movie, and sometimes it makes things worse, but it's unquestionable that it's a costly way to make big-budget movies, especially those with heavy VFX pipelines.
Indecision is a problem in the big-budget realm and the core reason why we keep seeing these big franchises waffle so much film to film. Wheatley saying that he storyboarded every inch of "Meg 2: The Trench" is actually refreshing to hear. He wanted to make sure he had all the kinks worked out in advance and felt like he could put every penny of the film's substantial budget (the first film was a surprise hit, pulling in over half a billion dollars at the box office against a declared budget of $130 million) on the screen.
Gotta love that level of commitment to what could be just a big bit of goofy big budget absurd fun. I mean, I think Wheatley knows what the audience expects from a movie like "Meg 2: The Trench." They want big shark action and if he can deliver that to them by making sure there's no waste then I guess he was the right choice for the job.