The movie that ripped Spike Lee’s dream out of his hands: “The film’s not getting made”
You know Hollywood’s in a bad place when big filmmakers are struggling to get new movies greenlit and funded. What hope does that give any up-and-coming director?
We’ve seen it more recently with John Waters, who hasn’t been able to secure funding for his next film, an adaptation of his book Liarmouth, despite initially getting Aubrey Plaza on board to star. His most recent movie, A Dirty Shame, came out over 20 years ago – in 2004 to be precise – and now it’s looking like it could be his last.
Many directors who work away from the confines of the blockbuster framework just don’t get the support they need to make more films, but even someone like Spike Lee, who has made some pretty sizable films throughout his career, has still struggled against the industry’s lack of assistance. Unfortunately, it’s hard not to correlate Lee’s staunchly political films, which so often interrogate themes of racism, both on an individual and systemic level, with his struggle to secure funding.
Hollywood has always been wary of films that are too exposing, and Lee knows exactly how to make a movie that expertly confronts America’s race problems – just look at his seminal Do The Right Thing. But even when he found the most financial success of his career with 2006’s Inside Man, which grossed $184.4million, Lee still found himself fighting to make the sequel.
Exploring themes of political and social power, alongside the layers of corruption at the very foundation of American society, Inside Man works as both a poignant dissection of such issues and a solid crime thriller about a bank heist gone awry. You’d think that with the success of the movie, Lee would be able to make a sequel, but the opportunity seemed to get further and further away by the day.
“I haven’t made a feature film in three years,” he said in 2019, referring to the span between Chi-Raq and BlacKkKlansman. “Inside Man was my most successful film. But we can’t get the sequel made. And one thing Hollywood does well is sequels. The film’s not getting made. We tried many times. It’s not going to happen.”
It seemed bizarre that Hollywood was so resistant to a sequel when, as Lee says, the industry usually laps up sequels like they’re going out of fashion. So, while Lee has since made a handful of movies, no doubt spurred on by his Oscar success with BlacKkKlansman, his dream of an Inside Man sequel came rudely crashing down when a direct-to-video follow-up was made in 2019.
Inside Man 2 was in the works for a while with Lee attached to direct, while several cast members were set to reprise their roles, but by 2011, a lack of funding led the whole thing to fall apart. Somehow, then, a rather unrelated sequel, without any former cast members or Lee, was greenlit – filmed on a low budget, no less.
Directed by MJ Bassett, Inside Man: Most Wanted did a disservice to the original. It could’ve been followed by an interesting sequel courtesy of Lee, bringing characters back and continuing the story, but clearly, the powers that be within Hollywood thought that it wasn’t meant to be.
