Night Has Fallen director gives an update on the Gerard Butler action sequel — but you may not like it

'We would be up for it, but...'

Stuntman-turned-director Ric Roman Waugh has a close relationship with Gerard Butler. The gruff action star, who Waugh refers to as "Jerry" has starred in four of his movies, starting with Angel Has Fallen (the third entry in the Fallen franchise about Secret Service agent Mike Banning) and continuing with the spy thriller Kandahar, the apocalyptic epic Greenland, and its post-apocalyptic sequel, Greenland: Migration.

That last one releases in theaters on Jan. 9, but what's next for the duo? Rumor has it we can expect the return of agent Banning in an upcoming four-quel titled Night Has Fallen. However, when Polygon spoke with Waugh ahead of Greenland: Migration's release (more on that in a future article), he offered a different sort of update.

"We would be up for it, but — and I know I speak for Jerry as well — we're not interested in just doing another sequel," Waugh said. "We'd really have to figure out what would make it fly as a new version, that it would evolve the Mike Banning character and so forth. I mean, I don't know, maybe we do the Lethal Weapon version. We have 87-year-old Morgan Freeman go toe-to-toe with Mike Banning. That'd be fun, but no, nothing's in the works right now. That would be something that would have to be cracked."

That's not exactly the news that Olympus Has Fallen fans were likely hoping for, but it's good to hear that Waugh and Butler are taking the franchise seriously and not just rushing out another sequel.

Speaking more generally about his experience working with Butler, Waugh wonders if the actor's appeal comes from a tendency to go against current Hollywood trends. In a world where Dwayne Johnson's contract once specified that he couldn't lose a fight onscreen, Butler isn't afraid to take it on the chin, literally.

"He's not afraid to be vulnerable and play flawed, relatable characters," Waugh says. "We've gone through a very big comic book stage in movie making where everybody's 10 feet tall and impervious to pain and bulletproof and no flaws and so forth and very shiny. I don't think Jerry's shiny, and I love that about him. He's very salt of the earth. He's a big kid at heart. We are not a black and white society. We're very grey. We're seeing that more and more, testing our own boundaries of what we think is moral. I think it's exciting to do that in movies, and Jerry's all for that."

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Greenland: Migration releases in theaters on Jan. 9.