Shyamalan’s Unbreakable 2 to become a Night Chronicle

You’ll be hard-pressed to find someone genuinely excited for the next feature from the once-promising M. Night Shyamalan. However, it’s important to remember the high quality of his early films, including the misunderstood superhero origin story Unbreakable.

Shyamalan has often spoken of his wish to make a sequel to Unbreakable (as recently as June in fact). He recently told MTV that his idea for Unbreakable 2 will instead be used for the third instalment of his Night Chronicles trilogy.

The Night Chronicles is a series of small films Shyamalan is producing. They are built around a Twilight Zone-esque hook, and will (presumably) conclude with a twist.

The first instalment is Drew and John Erick Dowdle’s Devil, in which a bunch of people get stuck in the Elevator and one of them is revealed to be … you guessed it … the devil. The second will likely be Twelve Strangers. Details on this project are scarce.

Anyway, Shyamalan spilled some details on the third, Unbreakable-esque chronicle to MTV:

“I cannibalized the idea for the sequel to ‘Unbreakable’ for one of the ‘Night Chronicles…It was such a cool idea for a villain, and it was actually originally in the script for ‘Unbreakable,’ and it was too much…There were too many villains, so I pulled this villain out and was like, ‘I’ll make this the second flick…I fleshed it out more and more, and thought, ‘This could be a standalone movie…I’ll just say it: the third ‘Night Chronicles’ movie is what would have been the sequel [to ‘Unbreakable’]. So now I need to come up with a new idea.”

Intriguingly, Shyamalan implies that Unbreakable 2 is still on the cards (even if he is now without an idea for it). Even more intriguingly, Shyamalan tells MTV that his two favourite movies from his oeuvre are Unbreakable and, ahem, The Village.

Discuss: How do you feel about Shyamalan?