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Greenland was a surprise hit in 2020, and a sequel, Greenland 2: Migration, hits theaters Friday. The first film is all about John Garrity (Gerard Butler) and his family racing to the titular location, hoping to be among the lucky few who find shelter in the doomsday bunkers hidden there. In the sequel, they emerge from their underground home and strike out to find a more permanent place to put down roots. Both films revolve around the damage wrought by “Clarke,” a giant comet that smashes directly into Earth.
If the name Clarke (note the spelling) and the interstellar themes of the Greenland films make your mind go directly to the most obvious inspiration, well—you’d be wrong. Clarke is not named after Arthur C. Clarke, one of the most notable science fiction authors of all time.
This anti-Easter egg of sorts was confirmed by Ric Roman Waugh, who directed both Greenland movies, the first of which was written by Chris Sparling. (The sequel is co-written by Sparling and Mitchell LaFortune.)
“No,” Waugh told io9 when we asked if Clarke the comet was named after the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Childhood’s End. “We were kind of playing with just the idea that hurricanes—like, who comes up with all these names of every hurricane? So we just kind of played with that. You hear about all of these different comets that have all of these numerical and different alphabetic situations [as names]; I don’t think we want to go through a movie that says, ‘Yeah, X8343 is coming close to the Earth.'”
He continued. “So it wasn’t any reference to other names, other than I like the idea that [Gerard Butler’s character] John Garrity’s name is John, just a simple name that is very common. These people are [just like] us, and the fact that we’re naming something that can kill the Earth and kill people is no different than what we do with hurricanes.”
So there you have it: sometimes a Clarke is just a Clarke. We’ll have more of our interview with Waugh coming soon, and Greenland 2: Migration is in theaters January 9.
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