It’s sort of amazing that it took until 2018 for somebody to realize that what the world needed was a movie where Jason Statham fights a giant shark. Luckily, somebody did eventually figure that out and we were gifted with The Meg. And clearly people really were looking for a movie where Jason Statham fought a giant shark because the movie made a lot of money at the global box office. And after a much longer than planned delay, The Meg 2 is currently in production. Now we know when we’ll actually see it.
Meg 2: The Trench has officially been dated by Warner Bros. and is scheduled to hit theaters August 4, 2023, according to Bloody Disgusting. Jason Statham is set to reprise his role. The script was written by Dean Georgaris and Jon & Erich Hoeber, who penned the first movie as well. Ben Wheatley is directing the new movie, taking over from Jon Turteltaub who helmed the first installment.
The new movie takes its title from Steve Alten’s second book in his Meg series. One assumes the plot of the sequel will also be inspired by the book, though the 2018 film did end in a significantly different way than the book, so one assumes there will be changes to this second adaptation as well.
When Meg 2 arrives in theaters next August it will be five years since the first movie opened, which is actually a long time in the modern world of franchise filmmaking, especially when the first movie was such a solid hit. The sequel had the greenlight only a couple months after the first movie was released. Of course, the global pandemic certainly had a lot to say about that. The script was still in development in early 2019. Director Ben Wheatley wasn’t brought on board until October of 2020, and by then we were already in the pandemic which meant nothing was going to move forward until that was dealt with.
Now that we’re in a place where film productions can happen, Meg 2: The Trench is in production, and it has a release date more than a year away, so there should be plenty of time to complete filming, start post-production, and do reshoots if needed. Even if things still need to be taken slow or production sees delays, hitting that date should not be hard.
Having said that, there’s still the possibility that Meg 2 could get pushed back from this set August date. Warner Bros. just moved around the dates of several DC projects and while no release date is ever set in stone, it’s clear that things are still much more fluid than they once were on that front. Still, the fact that The Meg sequel has a release date at all will be good news for fans. This movie is coming and that means we will get to see Jason Statham fight another giant shark, and that’s a good thing.