No 'Hancock 2'...At Least For a Good Long While

What, no aliens to fight? Peter Berg, who is making intelligent life from other galaxies a key component of his movie version of the board game Battleship, has cooled on the idea of Hancock 2. Certainly, a Will Smith movie that makes half a billion dollars is worth looking at for a sequel (if you're the studio), so it was no major surprise that Sony was keen on a follow-up. And it was steamrolling ahead until... Berg tells HitFix that Hancock 2 is on ice for now, and maybe for quite a while. Of his dealings with Smith and producers Michael Mann and Akiva Goldsman, Berg says, “To get us all in the same room where we can talk and then agree on anything? You'll never meet a group of people who will have a harder time agreeing on anything. It's like the Israeli peace process times a thousand in how tough it is for us all." He adds, "But I think it will happen, we just all have to get in the same room with some consistency.” Because Battleship has moved to the front of the line, where does that leave Hancock 2 in the pecking order? Apparently pretty far down the list. Berg has an adaptation of the novel Lone Survivor after Battleship, and then he may do a sequel to The Rundown, an underrated popcorn movie with Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, who is clearly a bigger movie star now than he was then, The Tooth Fairy notwithstanding. "We always joke 'When are we gonna do it?' But sometimes it's just a question of timing and getting all the stars to line up. There is no reason why we wouldn’t,” says Berg of another Rundown. I'd be fine with that one. Hell, I'd be fine with a second Hancock if the best idea they had wasn't, in essence, the same movie again.