Although 1995's Judge Dredd was the first movie to feature the 2000 AD character, the Sylvester Stallone-fronted movie was met with mostly negative reviews. Fortunately, the Dredd reboot came along 17 years later, and the general consensus was that it did a better job adapting the source material. Annihilation's Alex Garland wrote the script, and while it's public knowledge that he also helped out during the post-production process, according to Judge Dredd himself, Karl Urban, Garland is also the man who actually directed the movie. As Urban put it:
A huge part of the success of Dredd is in fact due to Alex Garland and what a lot of people don't realize is that Alex Garland actually directed that movie.
Here's some backstory for those unfamiliar with Dredd's production. Pete Travis, who previously helmed 2008's Vantage Point, is officially credited as Dredd's director, but when the reboot was in the editing stage, Travis was reportedly "prohibited" from participating in the creative process due to creative disagreement with higher-ups. Alex Garland, who was also an executive producer on Dredd, subsequently took over with editing, but now Karl Urban claims that it was actually Garland all along who handled the directing. In fact, as he said later in his interview with JoBlo, people should consider Dredd to be Garland's directorial debut, not 2015's Ex Machina. In the actor's words:
I just hope when people think of Alex Garland's filmography that Dredd is the first film that he made before Ex Machina. You think about it in those terms; it goes Dredd, Ex Machina, Annihilation.
Alex Garland's contributions to Dredd's editing were reportedly significant enough that there was consideration into giving him a co-director's credit, but a few days after this news went public, Garland and Pete Travis issued a joint statement saying that while there was an "unorthodox collaboration" between the two of them, Travis was still involved and Garland wasn't interested in being labeled as a co-director. But now, from what Urban has said, it sounds like Garland was more than deserving of such a credit. This wouldn't be the first time that an actor had claimed that someone else is responsible for a movie's success. As an example, last year Val Kilmer stated that it was Kurt Russell who was the one who made Tombstone work so well.
There are still no plans to release Dredd 2, but a TV show called Judge Dredd: Mega-City One is currently in development, and it's possible Karl Urban will reprise Judge Dredd for that series. As for Alex Garland, his latest movie, Annihilation, is still playing in theaters. Stay tuned to CinemaBlend for news on what he's working on next, and check out our 2018 release schedule to see what's heading to theaters this year.
