David Twohy discusses Riddick III

It won't be like 'Chronicles'. Honest. What is this 'Chronicles' anyway? Never heard of it...

Pitch Black and Chronicles of Riddick director and writer David Twohy has discussed the third instalment that he has in mind for the Riddick franchise.

The director, during an interview for new movie A Perfect Getaway, told Shocktilyoudrop: "I've sketched out two ideas for the next installment...Vin [Diesel] and I have decided on one approach of those two, and there's some interest at the studio level but it would be as a PG-13 film, and we don't want to do that anymore. That's one of the concessions we thought we made with Riddick that we shouldn't have made. We also spent too much money and we were too ambitious. So yes, if we do go back to a third one, it will be focused again, hopefully again the same way that Pitch Black was, and we'll spend less money doing it. We're just trying to figure out how much less we can do it for, because I don't think Vin is going to work for scale again."

The 2004 sequel The Chronicles Of Riddick greatly expanded on the budget and scope of 2000's Pitch Black, the SF chiller that introduced shiny-eyed psychopath Richard B. Riddick to the world, but proved a critical and box-office disaster. A lot of the blame for that was laid on the central character needing a bit more 'anti' and a bit less 'hero', in line with the set-up of the original Pitch Black.

Twohy seems to have ruled out the return of the bat-like night-dwelling creatures that ate up most of the marooned cast of Pitch Black (and were later outrageously copied in the video game Gears Of War)

Chronicles failed to claw back its $110 million budget, even with foreign sales, but the continuing popularity of Diesel and the Riddick video games (The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay and The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena) combine with the cult status of Pitch Black to maintain interest in the character.

"The third movie would be more modestly-scaled," said Twohy. "and it would probably feel more like Pitch Black than Chronicles...the hallmark of a good movie, and I think Pitch Black is a good movie, is that even if you took the creatures out of the picture, you'd still have some pretty interesting character dynamics going on within that group, and it's almost like you can tell the same story without the creature or substitute some other external pressure on the group, because there were internal pressures as well that were interesting."

Having just recently watched and re-enjoyed Pitch Black, I can only support Twohy in his aim of bringing Riddick back to what he was at the start, and we can all pretend Chronicles was just a bad hallucination (Philip K. Dick can explain)...