Legacyquels are all the rage in Hollywood these days, and that means that producer Jerry Bruckheimer holds a lot of playable cards. In the last few years, he has been a player in the returns of the Top Gun, Bad Boys and Beverly Hills Cop franchises, and he has plans for more. What does he have cooking? One specific title he is looking to revisit is the naval drama of Crimson Tide.
Featuring the above-the-title star power of Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman, Crimson Tide was a big hit with both critics and audiences when it was released in 1995, and Bruckheimer is making moves to develop a 30-years-later sequel. He made mention of the project during a recent guest spot on The Rich Eisen Show, saying that talent is already attached:
We have a really good director and writer talking to the Navy right now about what’s going on under the water.
Jerry Bruckheimer didn’t drop any names regarding the filmmakers attached, but apparently they are so deeply involved that they are already doing research trips so that they can have a better understanding of the setting in which they’ll be working.
But what about star power? Gene Hackman sadly passed away earlier this year, but Jerry Bruckheimer says that there is a goal to bring back Denzel Washington – suggesting that the story being developed will either involve or be directly about Lieutenant Commander Ronald “Ron” Hunter. Said the producer,
We have Denzel. . . . If we give him a good script, I think he’d do it.
Directed by Tony Scott, the original Crimson Tide is set aboard a U.S. nuclear missile submarine and finds two officers in high stakes conflict regarding an order to launch their vessel’s payload. While the movie came out three decades ago, nuclear submarines are still very much a thing, so there obviously is a world to revisit, and trading the atmosphere of post-Cold War to our modern conflict has a lot of potential.
It sounds like this project isn’t exactly going to be ready to go into production next month, but it is noteworthy regardless that Denzel Washington has an interesting slate of upcoming projects. His newest movie, Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest, is arriving in theaters on August 22, but he is also attached to the Netflix heist movie Here Comes The Flood with Robert Pattinson and Daisy Edgar-Jones, and he has openly discussed a potential role in Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther 3. And let’s not forget that he’s recently been working on Broadway starring opposite Jake Gyllenhaal in Othello.
As noted, Jerry Bruckheimer has been very successful in the last few years developing sequels to his hits from the 1990s, so don’t be surprised if we soon start hearing a lot more about Crimson Tide 2.