Charlie Countryman helmer Fredrik Bond was in talks to direct the follow-up to Olympus Has Fallen (named London Has Fallen), but he departed the project a little earlier this month. Bond was in fact a replacement for the first movie’s director Antoine Fuqua who didn’t like the plans for the sequel and decided to depart.
The hunt has since been on for yet another replacement, and it’s Babak Najafi. He’s best known for helming Snabba Cash sequel Easy Money II: Hard to Kill. A number of up and coming directors have been vying for the London Has Fallen gig, but it’s Najafi that star Gerard Butler is said to be happiest with.
Najafi actually won the award for “Best Dubut Film” at Berlin in 2010 for Sebbe and has also directed a number of episodes of Banshee. The Sapphires helmer Wayne Blair was also considered at one point.
Gerard Butler, Aaron Eckhart and Morgan Freeman are all set to reprise their roles in London Has Fallen, and as you can probably guess from the title, the sequel is set to bring the action to London, where the British Prime Minister has passed away under mysterious circumstances. His funeral is a must-attend event for leaders of the Western world, but what starts out as the most protected event on Earth turns into a deadly plot to kill the world’s most powerful leaders and unleash a terrifying vision of the future.
Only three people have any hope of stopping it: the President of the United States, his formidable secret service head (a.k.a. Mike Banning), and an English MI-6 agent who rightly trusts no one.
Christian Gudegast (A Man Apart) wrote the most recent draft of the script following Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt’s (who wrote the first instalment) first go, and producers are eyeing an October production start date ahead of an expected October 2nd, 2015 release date for London Has Fallen.
