Movies
Van Damme wanted to make a sequel to one of his best movies of the 90s: Here’s what the sequel we’ll never have would look like
We remember how Jean-Claude Van Damme wanted to make ‘Double Impact 2′ together with the director and co-writer of the original.
Jean-Claude Van Damme was one of the biggest action movie stars of the late 80’s and 90’s. The Belgian born actor left us with many stories and movies to remember, such as ‘Bloodsport’ (1988) or ‘Double Impact’ (1991). JCVD’s had plans to create a sequel for the latter, which unfortunately was never produced. Van Damme even wrote 25 pages of the script together with Sheldon Lettich, but unfortunately, the sequel was canceled.
This would have been ‘Double Impact 2′, the sequel to one of Van Damme’s most memorable movies.
After its release in 1991, ‘Double Impact’ was profitable as it managed to make about twice its budget at the box office. Although this commercial success was significantly less than other previous JCVD productions such as ‘Bloodsport’ (1988) and ‘Kickboxer’ (1989), it still proved that Van Damme was a safe bet for action movies. In this movie, the actor played two twin brothers who must join forces to take revenge on some gangsters who murdered their parents.
Due to his involvement in the script, ‘Double Impact’ was a movie that Jean-Claude Van Damme particularly liked. There were even talks with Sheldon Lettich, the director and co-writer, about a possible sequel. In the first movie, the two main characters played by Van Damme, Alex and Chad Wagner, fight a bloody battle in Hong Kong, where Alex grew up, separated from his brother when they were babies. For the sequel, JCVD wanted to explore the opposite approach, with a new story in which the brothers would find themselves in trouble in Los Angeles, CA.
JCVD himself went so far as to summarize the plot of this hypothetical sequel as “two twins, one returns from Asia to Los Angeles to help his brother who has gotten into trouble with the mob for pretending to be a big movie producer when in fact he has ripped them off”. In 2012, during the promotional tour for 'The Expendables 2′, Van Damme confirmed in an interview that this sequel was in the works and that he had drafted 25 pages of script that was being reviewed and corrected by Sheldon Lettich. There was also talk that the tone of this movie would be even more serious than the original.
By 2015, however, both Van Damme and Lettich were facing reality: this movie was too ambitious and would have been too expensive to produce. Lettich went so far as to say in an interview that in addition to the budget problems, there were logistical problems regarding who owned the rights. MGM owned most of them, so acquiring them would not be cheap. In addition, they would have to be involved as co-producers, which made the whole process of creating this new film legally difficult. This situation underscored Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s refusal to green-light the project.
In 2019, at a screening of the original film in Austin, Texas, Sheldon Lettich confirmed that the project had been canceled. His theory for MGM’s refusal was that, ironically, the financial success of the first film had stalled the sequel: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer didn’t want to sell its rights cheaply in the face of a potential new hit, but it also didn’t want to be left out of the production.
In short, fans can only dream of what this ‘Double Impact 2′ would have been like, allowing them to see how the relationship between Alex and Chad evolved as they faced new dangers. One of the main attractions of the original was the great contrast between the personalities of each twin - Chad was raised “between cotton wool” while Alex grew up in the harsh streets of Hong Kong - something that would undoubtedly have been explored in this hypothetical sequel.
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