Quit lying: you know you wanted a Hitman sequel. You NEEDED a Hitman sequel. And Sony will give you a Hitman sequel, and they’ll go to the ends of the Earth to get it for you. Even with the tragic loss of the film’s leading man Paul Walker, Agent 47 rumbles on, with new Hitman Rupert Friend taking the reigns in the sequel to the $100 million dollar global hit that was much bigger overseas and contains not a single frame that you’ve willingly seen since 2007.
Deadline reports that Zachary Quinto has joined the cast of Agent 47 in an unspecified role. Quinto, best known as Spock in the Star Trek film series, has been very delicate with his increased visibility in the wake of his conversion to Vulcanism. He’s done bit parts in a few indies, while also trying out a recurring stint on FX’s American Horror Story. He’s mostly been active behind the scenes producing short films, though he did produce, and then serve as executive producer, for JC Chandor’s two films, the Oscar-nominated Margin Call and this year’s All Is Lost.
While there is no information being released regarding Quinto’s role, it seems plausible that he would be serving as some sort of villain. Qunto’s got a hard-edged coldness to him, and a delivery that can believably come across as venomous. It certainly did in his breakout role as the killer Silas in Heroes, a showcase that deserved better than that remarkably poorly-written genre series. Qunto doesn’t seem wholly concerned with superstardom, which is probably smart, given that he’s guaranteed a certain level of visibility thanks to the endless ATM machine that is the Star Trek series. Agent 47 feels like the most overtly commercial decision he’s made since Star Trek, and if he’s great people will notice, and if he’s terrible, no one will care.
So goes the expectations for a sequel to Hitman. The first film was based on the best-selling videogame and continued the rock-solid tradition of all movies based on video games being almost entirely terrible. But it was cheap, being made with a modest $24 million budget. The production’s pursuit of Paul Walker suggests the studio has bigger grosses in mind fir the sequel, but with the relatively anonymous Friend in the lead couldn’t this go straight-to-DVD and no one would be bothered? Skip Woods, who wrote the first film (as well as A Good Day To Die Hard and X-Men Origins: Wolverine… yikes), returns to co-write this one with Mike Finch, while directing duties have been passed on from French horror maven Xavier Gens to first-timer Aleksander Bach. Hopefully Friend and Quinto have slightly more passion for the project than original star Timothy Olyphant, who copped to taking the role simply to pay for his house
