Wanted creator Mark Millar has told STV that a sequel to the blockbuster movie will go ahead this year despite the non-involvement of the first movie’s lead actress Angelina Jolie.

According to New York Magazine she has dropped plans to reprise her role as Fox in the Wanted franchise to star in Alfonso Cuarón’s space thriller Gravity, but Millar explained that that won’t torpedo plans for the sequel to be shot for release next year. (Be warned, spoilers for the original movie lie ahead…)

Millar said: “Wanted 2 will be certainly going ahead, because the first one made too much money for them not to do a sequel.

“What was funny was originally Wanted was just going to be one movie, and Angelina dies at the end, Morgan Freeman dies at the end – sorry to anyone who hasn’t bought it yet…

“The idea was that it was going to be self-contained, but the movie cost $75 million to make and it made $314 million back just theatrically. At the premiere the tracking was really good and everything, and the producer came up and said ‘What are we going to do for Wanted 2?’ and I was like ‘I don’t have any ideas!’

“So they put something together, and it was bringing Angelina back from the dead and everything. I don’t know, I think that probably just didn’t sit easily with her, because it has to be a really good reason why somebody comes back from the dead.”

The 2008 film adaptation of Wanted, which was based on Millar comic book miniseries, starred Scottish actor James McAvoy as a frustrated office worker who learned that he is the son of a professional assassin and shared his superhuman killing abilities.

Millar added: “I think it’s actually more authentic if they keep her dead. She was the star of the movie really, but how cool is it to have the star dead and bring in another cool character for the next one.

“What I heard was that there’s filming this year for a release at the end of next year, so the plot that they had will have some modifications now, her character will have to be written out completely.

“We’ll see what happens, I don’t know, it changes every day. Again, things get so out of your hands with film because 300 people are involved, whereas with comics it’s just you and your artist.”

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Universal craved a sequel to Angelina Jolie’s assassination tango/loom tutorial Wanted. Unfortunately for the studio, Jolie is leaving them…wanting. We’ve just heard the actress has pulled out of the planned Timur Bekmambetov-directed sequel at Universal, and the studio has pulled the plug rather than recast the film. As for Jolie, we hear she is now intent on starring in Warner Bros.’ Gravity, a space thriller to be directed by Children of Men’s Alfonso Cuarón from a script he wrote with his 28-year-old son, Jonás.

Like Wanted 2, Gravity had previously been set up at Universal, with Jolie set to star. But a few weeks ago, the studio put Gravity into turnaround, possibly because it’s such an artistically challenging project: Jolie would be alone on-screen for much of the movie, playing the sole surviving human member of a space mission, desperately trying to return home to Earth and her daughter. (In that way it’s reminiscent of the brilliant, little-seen Moon with Sam Rockwell. Seriously, why won’t you see it?) Now Warners has snapped it up, and it will be produced by Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows producer David Heyman and Legendary Pictures.

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