Shyamalan Steals His Own 'Unbreakable' Sequel Plot

It looks like we won't get Unbreakable 2, after all. Of course, at this stage of his career, I can't imagine there are too many people left who want to see M. Night Shyamalan do much of anything, but it isn't that the writer-director has killed the idea. He's just lifted it for something else.

"I cannibalized the idea for the sequel to Unbreakable for one of the Night Chronicles," Shyamalan told MTV about his new upstart movie series...that Universal has since renamed to avoid having his name splashed across everything. The first movie, The Night Chronicles: Devil, is just Devil these days. Night Chronicles is also the name of the production company Shyamalan created for the low-budget thrillers, and Devil leads the way for two other proposed movies.

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First Clip from Night Shyamalan's 'Devil'

I don't think it's a good sign - but I'm bad at reading signs - when in every case that I have seen the trailer for Devil in theaters, the audience collectively laughs at the credit "from the mind of M. Night Shyamalan." They've been burned, these patrons, by a guy who ran out of ideas a few years ago.

I don't know to this day why some people see The Village as anything but a longwinded Twilight Zone episode. Bryce Dallas Howard was very good, true, but the pacing in that film is terrible. Lady in the Water and The Happening have a much broader consensus of derision. And then Night went and totally effed up The Last Airbender. It doesn't even look professionally made. Now, he's not directing Devil, but the damage could be done. In fact, Universal has thrown up one white flag of surrender already: It used to be called The Night Chronicles: Devil, but the association with Shyamalan's name is seen as a bad thing now. Snip, snip. And that's a shame, really. Not that the movie will be great, but I'm drawn to one-room thrillers like this, so I did kind of have hopes for it. Watch the new clip from Devil and see what you think. Moved at all?

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Trailer - The Night Shyamalan-Produced 'Devil'

Good timing, eh? On the heels of M. Night Shyamalan's worst-received movie to date, Universal changed the name of its upcoming collaboration with him from The Night Chronicles: Devil to simply Devil. And while the bad press is still rolling in, despite decent box office, here's the first trailer for Devil.

It appears to be an elevator thrilla, with a group of strangers trapped in a lift when all sorts of supernatural stuff starts happening. Seems like an easy setup, as single-location movies kind of have to be. Night didn't write or direct this, but the story is "from the mind of M. Night Shyamalan," and the production itself is partially from the pocket of Night Shyamalan, too. John Erick Dowdle is actually the director (IMDB also lists brother Drew Dowdle), and the new trailer for his flick is pretty substantial for this kind of thing, which is why it may have been smarter to wait a couple weeks to release it so the movie is clear from Last Airbender blowback.

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Night Shyamalan Responds to 'Last Airbender' Reviews

Money's a great deodorant, so we'll see how this weekend plays out for M. Night Shyamalan, whose career, once the envy of just about every filmmaker in Hollywood, has taken critical drubbing after critical drubbing since The Village in 2004, and it seems that The Last Airbender has taken the sharpest criticism yet.

Proudly wearing an 8% approval rating at Rotten Tomatoes with a whopping nine positive reviews culled from around the country, Airbender nonetheless made decent money on Thursday and may go $50 million or a bit more for the six-day weekend. But it has a long way to go to make real money. When asked by Vulture if he had a reaction to all the negative press, Shyamalan defended his work in really the only way he can. "I don't know what to say to that stuff. I bring as much integrity to the table as humanly possible," he said. "It must be a language thing, in terms of a particular accent, a storytelling accent. I can only see it this certain way and I don't know how to think in another language."

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Movie Review - 'The Last Airbender'

The Last Airbender Starring Noah Ringer, Dev Patel, and Nicola Peltz Directed by M. Night Shyamalan Rated PG

A brain-dead movie devoid of new ideas, drowning in creaky dialogue and unquestionably miscast, M. Night Shyamalan's The Last Airbender is an appallingly, unrelentingly bad film. It's unimaginable that this story could be told any worse. To give you an idea of the unpleasantness, I attended a midnight showing on opening night, with the kind of audience anticipating it the most. Within 40 seconds of the prologue crawl on screen, there was audible mocking and giggling. It lasted for 100 minutes. Some of that reaction, of course, is group think. When people are heckling in the dark, it's human nature to get in on the fun. However, in this case, it's mostly justified. While a movie version of a TV show doesn't have to cater specifically to the fans of the show on which it's based, it's probably better if endless complaints about the new version aren't heard more loudly than the dialogue. In this case, though, hearing anything over the dialogue is like an oasis in the desert. Unless, of course, it's James Newton Howard's Musical Score By Numbers orchestration, which is just generic enough to still be irritating. From beginning to end, and in almost every way possible, The Last Airbender is a failure, incompetent, uninteresting, moronic, poor. Night Shyamalan made two-and-a-half good movies, but from the moment we saw the reflection of the alien in Signs, it's been a steep drop-off. There was hope for this, though, because of the beloved Nickelodeon animated series that serves as the source material. But Shyamalan has ground it into a pulp here, reducing the scope of an epic story that spanned three seasons on TV to just over an hour and a half. The setup will be familiar to fans of the series. The film flashes a title card - Book One: Water, which is the designation for the first season. Presumably, follow-up films would use Book Two: Earth and Book Three: Fire, but it doesn't seem likely that there will be sequels to this movie, not if Paramount has any sense of self-preservation.

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