The 2008 role Angelina Jolie had no intention of playing twice: “I actually changed the ending”
Her filmography makes it clear that Angelina Jolie isn’t opposed to the idea of playing the same character more than once, but she still needs to draw the line somewhere.
The actor squeezed herself into Lara Croft’s skin-tight shorts twice, for Tomb Raider and its sequel, and she donned Maleficent’s gigantic headgear to play the title role in the Sleeping Beauty origin story and its follow-up, even if the law of diminishing returns set in on both fronts.
There was every chance that she’d have reprised the part of Eternals‘ Thena in at least one more Marvel movie had Chloé Zhao’s millennia-spanning comic book adaptation not underperformed at the box office, making a mockery of the ‘Eternals Will Return’ tag that ended the film. Harry Styles was in that one, too, and he hasn’t been rubbing shoulders with Iron Man and Captain America, either.
Jolie also voiced Tigress in the first three Kung Fu Panda pictures and an animated short, but three returns to the well is fairly minimal for a career that started over 30 years ago. The Academy Award winner sounded keen about a Salt sequel once upon a time, but those days have long since passed.
Generally, then, she doesn’t do sequels. However, Hollywood generally doesn’t care. If a movie makes money, regardless of whether or not it’s supposed to start a franchise, a sequel will enter development under the expectation that waving enough money in front of the cast will be enough to convince them.
Sometimes it is, but when Jolie had the sneaking suspicion that Universal had high hopes for Wanted, which were well-founded, seeing as director Timur Bekmambetov’s comic book caper came within a whisker of earning $350million at the box office, a strong result for an R-rated blockbuster in the summer of 2008, she took matters into her own hands.
In the third act, the star’s enigmatic, Clint Eastwood-inspired assassin, Fox, conspires to take her own life by firing one of the film’s signature curving bullets around a room, killing everyone in the vicinity, including herself. That wasn’t part of the plan, but a combination of her convictions and the looming spectre of a potential sequel required drastic action.
“I actually changed the ending,” she shared. “I said, ‘If she was to find out she had killed people unjustly and was a part of something that wasn’t fair, then she should take her own life.” That was the diplomatic version, but when Wanted 2 was announced in 2009, Jolie dropped the façade.
“They were trying,” Jolie said, revealing the studio was fluttering its eyelashes in her direction to bring her back. “But I kind of feel like if I die in a movie, I should die actually. It would just be doing the exact same thing in another movie, so it’s not that interesting to me.”
She didn’t even have to cross that bridge anyway, with all attempts to get the Wanted sequel off the ground amounting to nothing.
