May 12, 2009 10:00 AM
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Despite bombing with the critics, Jumper, the 2007 movie about a teleporting asshole, was a modest success financially, and may get a sequel. Steven Gould, author of the original novel, has some ideas. Spoilers follow...
Gould wrote the young adult novel Jumper way back in 1992. He penned the sequel book Reflex in 2004 and also wrote the movie's tie-in novel Jumper: Griffin's Story. Although he was involved in the original movie's production, director Doug Liman changed the story drastically, deliberately removing all the sympathetic aspects of the protagonist David Rice (Hayden Christensen) to subvert the superhero concept more fully (oh, so that's what he was trying to do).
Though the movie failed to make back its $85 million budget domestically, it made well over $220 million worldwide, enough to warrant sequel talk. Liman has previously stated that he would want to use Reflex as the source material for the second film, focusing on expanding the Jumpers' teleportation powers. The book also focuses on Rice's girlfriend Millie, played by Rachel Bilson in the original film, gaining the ability to jump. Liman also mentioned he wanted to include new abilities like jumping to other planets and traveling through time.
In an interview yesterday, Gould updated what was going on with the sequel, noting what the director is honing in on from the source material:
Liman has expressed a particular interest in an unspecified moment in the sequel Reflex, and I suspect it's this twinning thing that Davy does, where he's jumping to a place and back and forth to the point where he's in both places at once, and a hole opens connecting the two places. So when he's chained to a wall, he jumps back and forth to the ocean and all this water floods out of the hole. If ever there was a cinematic moment, that's it. And then there's this thing from Reflex where you have a very shadow-y Illuminati sort of government agency and they very much want to control jumpers. And that organization showed up in the scripts, but they ended up having to cut it because of budget. So that thread might show up.
OK, I'll admit it - that sounds kind of cool. Utterly nonsensical, but cool. Still, we're talking about the sequel to Jumper here. I'd say cool but nonsensical is a pretty decent level to shoot for.
Meanwhile, Gould also teased his next two books: an adult novel about a terrorist attack using bugs that eat anything metal but leave organic matter untouched - unless you try to destroy them, in which case they turn really nasty. And then he's working on a third Jumper novel (or fourth, if you count Griffin's Story), about Davy and Millie trying to have children.
Send an email to Alasdair Wilkins, the author of this post, at alasdair@io9.com.
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
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