00:00Hello friends!
00:01M. Night Shyamalan pulled off his greatest twist yet with last year's Split, which in
00:05its final scene revealed it had been a secret sequel to 2000's Unbreakable all along.
00:09This week on Heat Vision Breakdown, we look forward to Glass and ask if Shyamalan can
00:13pull off something almost no one can, creating an original trilogy that's actually good,
00:18and then walking away from it.
00:23It's hard to imagine, but back when M. Night Shyamalan released Unbreakable in 2000, it
00:27was received with muted response and box office, particularly after the hysteria he'd caused
00:32just a year earlier with another Bruce Willis vehicle, The Sixth Sense.
00:35Shyamalan's cerebral deconstruction of the superhero genre starred Willis as a man who
00:39discovers he may have superpowers, and Samuel L. Jackson as a comic book obsessed man who
00:44knows he's destined to be a villain.
00:46Hard to imagine a condescending comic book shop owner becoming a bad guy.
00:50Behoo!
00:51I am the Collector!
00:52Unbreakable came at a time before the modern superhero boom, arriving just months after
00:56Bryan Singer's X-Men slowly started to convince mainstream audiences that folks wearing spandex,
01:01or more accurately for the time, black leather, were cool.
01:04Shyamalan wasn't allowed to mention the words comic books or superheroes in the marketing,
01:09because Buena Vista didn't think audiences would connect with that, and when the film
01:12came out he was deflated.
01:14But over the years superheroes have become the biggest thing in the world, save maybe Fortnite,
01:17bird scooters, and that cool backpack kid dance.
01:23And Unbreakable has become regarded as one of the great superhero films of all time.
01:27Little did audiences know, 17 years later Shyamalan would revive the franchise for a film starring
01:32James McAvoy as a man with multiple personalities, and Anya Taylor-Joy as a high schooler, held
01:37prisoner by him and forced to face his villainous beast personality head on.
01:40Shyamalan had actually written McAvoy's character, Kevin Wendell Crumb, there's the name, into the
01:45Unbreakable script, but he didn't quite fit in, making it all the more amazing that when
01:49Glass opens next year, it'll be a trilogy 18 years in the making.
01:53It can buy cigarettes.
01:54You have to be 21.
01:55What?
01:56Since when?
01:57Unbreakable is also rare in the world of trilogies, in that it's not only not based on previously
02:01released materials, but it presumably is not going to spawn endless sequels.
02:05And assuming Glass is actually good, it will be the rare trilogy with three solid entries.
02:10Sorry Godfather and the Matrix.
02:11You know which ones I'm talking about.
02:13Why am I here?
02:14Meanwhile, a trilogy rarely ever stays a trilogy.
02:17After Lord of the Rings, director Peter Jackson went on to make The Hobbit, which turned
02:21a 300-page children's book into a bloated prequel trilogy with romantic dwarf subplots
02:25and the worst CG horse in cinema history.
02:28The same thing happened with Star Wars and Indiana Jones, one of the greatest trilogies of
02:31all time, which ballooned to include a fourth, and now a fifth, installment.
02:35It would honestly make more sense for someone to be looking for Indy's own tomb at this point.
02:39It's not the years, honey.
02:41It's the mileage.
02:43It is true that there have been a handful of great trilogies based on original concepts.
02:46Robert Zemeckis' Back to the Future, excluding maybe the third one, Robert Rodriguez's Mariachi
02:51trilogy, Sam Raimi's Evil Dead, even Edgar Wright's Cornetto trilogy if you want to get
02:54really loose with how you define a cinematic trilogy.
02:57Yeah, boy!
02:58Though it's done with wildly different subject matter from Shyamalan's Unbreakable movies,
03:03Richard Linklater's Before films might be the closest analog as 1995's Before Sunrise
03:07seemed like quite an unlikely candidate to spark a franchise.
03:10The romantic series starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy just kept going every nine years,
03:15against the odds, like that couple from high school who got married and everyone thought
03:18would break up.
03:19Glass also defies the odds by being a rare partnership between two studios.
03:22Disney owns the rights to Unbreakable, while Universal owns the rights to Split, and the
03:26two agreed to partner for this venture, seemingly making it less likely this universe will continue
03:30beyond Glass.
03:31There would be nothing inherently wrong with Unbreakable Spawning Mort films, but there's
03:35something decidedly old-fashioned and beautiful about the idea of this living as just a trilogy.
03:40Perhaps that will be Shyamalan's greatest twist, not succumbing to temptation of a sprawling
03:45universe.
03:46Also, he's a werewolf.
03:47Woohoo!
03:48Are you an M. Night Shyamalan fan?
03:50Did we leave out any trilogies that you would like to talk about?
03:53Let us know in the comments right down there, and check back here every Friday morning for new
03:56episodes of Heat Vision Breakdown.
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