Neill Blomkamp still isn’t sure if District 10 is “getting made or not”
The sequel to Blomkamp's District 9 has been rumored since 2021
Aux News Neill Blomkamp
Neill Blomkamp is not a man of many words—at least when it comes to his past projects. The Gran Turismo director made this fact abundantly clear in a bizarrely contentious interview with Uproxx, in which the director completely stone-walled the interviewer whenever he deigned to mention anything other than Gran Turismo.
While not quite so extreme, the director recently took a similar approach to talking about his long-rumored District 9 sequel, District 10. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Blomkamp clammed up when the conversation moved away from his 2023 racing film.
In response to a question about whether the potential sequel would be produced by Sony, which he also worked with on Gran Turismo and District 9, Blomkamp responded, “Yeah, they would be tied to it.” He continued: “I don’t know if it’s getting made or not. I don’t know if I even want to make that right now, but at some point down the line, it’ll probably get made.”
“I just think the response to Gran Turismo bodes well for District 10’s chances,” the interviewer pressed, which is a bit of a spin job. While the film is currently doing decently well at the box office, reviews have been mixed at best. (In his “C” review for The A.V. Club, Eric Francisco called the film “too unconfident, too distracted, too rote, and simply too short on gas to earn a place on the winner’s podium.”)
Whether Blomkamp saw through this tactic or simply wanted to move on is unclear. Either way, all he said was, “Yeah, that makes sense.”
None of this is great news for fans of the original alien film, which rocked both the box office and awards season upon its release in 2009. While Blomkamp teased that a screenplay for District 10 from original collaborators Sharlto Copley and Terri Tatchell was “coming” in a since-deleted tweet from 2021, not much has been said about the film from any party since. The only concrete detail we really know is that the script was inspired by “a topic in American history,” which is… not that much at all.
12 Comments
“In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Blomkamp clammed up when the conversation moved away from his 2023 racing film.”I’m not sure what you’re expecting someone to say about a film that he doesn’t know if is happening or not, or – according to him – if he even wants to do it.
I assume the use of “clammed up” is attempting to make a seafood-play on words (since the aliens in District 9 are nicknamed “prawns”), but I admit that I could be giving the writer too much credit.
I support making puns just for the halibut.
I think you’re giving too much credit, lol. There’s no way an AI came up with that.
His answer seemed perfectly fine! He gave plenty of info: probably gonna happen someday, not at the top of his priority list right now. Also, LOFUCKINGL at the idea that Gran Turismo isn’t helping raise Blomkamp’s profile due to “mixed reviews” despite good box office.Yes, studios famously put all their faith on the AV Club’s arbitrary ranking and not on the fact that a movie makes a ton of money.
Maybe, and I can’t believe this didn’t occur to someone writing for the A.V. Club, he was trying to do the bare minimum to show solidarity with WGA and SAG. He’s contractually obligated to promote the Gran Turismo film but he doesn’t have to start feeding the hype train for another project or discuss past projects like District 9.
It’s kind of sad that Neill Blomkamp is at the taking shitty directing jobs for money stage of his career already. His last movie before Gran Turismo, Demonic, made less than $500k at the box office. Granted it was made for less than $2M, but that’s still disappointing. He was is the running to make both a new Alien movie and a Halo movie. District 9 was released over a decade ago so I’m not even sure that people would even want a sequel now.
It definitely is shocking. I wonder how much of his stalled out career is because people started having incredible expectations of him off the bat as the new “dark sci fi” master just off of a single movie. Also could just be incredibly bad luck, and if any of those first projects had gotten off the ground, like Alien, maybe he would have delivered and they’d be great. They likely would have been more collaborative and he wouldn’t have kept kept going with the full auteur stuff after using his biggest idea right away.
You know you’ve fucked up when your low-budget horror movie can’t crack a mil.
I really need to catch District 9. I just hadn’t done so yet. It sounds worthy of a watch, though.
i thought it was original and interesting. i enjoyed it very much.
Gran Turismo is the first Neill Blomkamp movie I’ve really liked since District 9.