The Maze Runner was a surprise hit – a $34-million adaptation of a popular YA book that (to date) has banked $163.4 million in worldwide ticket sales. The studio always had plans for a sequel, and now that the first film has established an audience, the second movie is beginning its casting with some exciting choices.
Breaking Bad and Once Upon a Time co-star Giancarlo Esposito has agreed to join the Maze Runner sequel, The Scorch Trials, for 20th Century Fox, THR reports. Esposito will play Jorge, described as the leader of a group known as the Cranks who encounters a gang of teenagers led by Dylan O’Brien’s character, Thomas, at the end of the first film.
Stop reading now if you haven’t yet seen The Maze Runner and still plan to.
At the end of The Maze Runner, Thomas leads a band of survivors out of a massive maze, dubbed The Glade, where they learn they were the test subjects of a much larger group. As they exit the facility, they are picked up in helicopters and advanced into a story that will continue in The Scorch Trials. The sequel will be based on James Dashner’s novel (as was The Maze Runner), and will be directed once again by Wes Ball.
Adding Giancarlo Esposito to any project automatically makes me more excited for it. He was incredibly riveting as Gustavo Fring, the "Chicken Man" who matched wits with Bryan Cranston’s Walter White on Breaking Bad.
Jorge, meanwhile, seems to be a significant character in both The Scorch Trials and the third book in Dashner’s series, The Death Cure. He and Brenda live in the Crank City, where Jorge is a pilot for WICKED, an acronym for World In Catastrophe: Killzone Experiment Department. Ah, so that explains why Patricia Clarkson kept saying, "WICKED is good" at the end of The Maze Runner.
The mythology of The Maze Runner hooked me, and I was intrigued to see where the story goes. The Maze Runner 2: The Scorch Trials is aiming for a September 18, 2015 release date.
