With Colombiana hitting theaters this weekend, people involved are loosening their lips and letting other project details slip. One of those individuals is Luc Besson, who along with writing Colombiana is also the scribe behind the action hit Taken. Presumably he’ll be writing the sequel, which was pretty much pegged as inevitable after the original film earned its first $100m, and became assured after the second $100m. But while Luc remains attached, it will be his Colombiana cohort Olivier Megaton that takes over for Taken 2 (or Taken Away or Took) from Pierre Morel (busy flirting with, but not getting Wolverine).

All of this we knew, but it is by way of Coming Soon that we learn the film is very near an October start date as Megaton uses his stateside promo time as an excuse for location scouting. Strangely enough, he also mentions that the sequel will see the full (still living) cast of the first film return, as if it matters at all. He doesn’t reveal anything about the setup of the film, so it’s still unclear if it’s going to be the daughter again or even his whole family being yanked away that sparks his trail of dead bad guy. Besson seems the type to take the clear escalation approach to something like this, so I’d bet on the family. Perhaps in the third he can save an entire church group or something, which would set a great precedent that by the seventh film could quite naturally send him to space to save the entire taken population of earth from mean alien sex traffickers!

I don’t think many people care if Famke Janssen or Maggie Grace show back up in a movie that is ultimately the Liam Neeson show, but there’s no reason not to keep it in the family. The first film enjoyed an anomalous success in spite of an early European release that empowered a huge amount of piracy, but I suspect the next will be a much more immediate mega-hit. People like their straightforward revenge films with touching Dad fantasy at the core, and as long as Besson and co. come up with some fun action and Megaton films it coherently, I will too.

When we find out who gets took, we’ll pass it along.

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