‘Meg 2: The Trench’ Budget Breakdown: How the Film Became a Box Office Hit

Budget for Meg 2: The Trench by Department

Cast

Once again fighting off prehistoric sharks is rough and gruff monster hunter Jonas Taylor, played once again by Fast & Furious franchise star Jason Statham. Ever since his breakout roles in Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, Statham has become a power player in the action world, starring in hits like The Transporter, The Italian Job, Crank, The Expandables, Fast & Furious 6, and more. This successful career has led to Statham having a net worth of about $90 million, which is more than half of the total budget for Meg 2: The Trench. Statham was more than likely paid more than his co-stars, likely around a minimum of $20 million.

Joining Statham are some returning allies from the first film, including Shuya Sophia Cai (Somewhere Only We Know) as Meiying, Cliff Curtis (Avatar: The Way of Water) as Mac, and Page Kennedy (S.W.A.T.) as DJ. Joining the Meg universe for the sequel is major Chinses film star Jing Wu, best known for films like The Wandering Earth and Wolf Warrior. The new cast is then rounded out by Sergio Peris-Mencheta (Resident Evil: Afterlife), Skyler Samuels (The Gifted), and Melissanthi Mahut (The Other Me). For the major cast members, the final price tag is likely somewhere around $40 million.

VFX

As significant as the leading actor Jason Statham is, the undisputed star of this franchise is the titular Megalodon. This time, however, Jonas Taylor faces off against not one, not two, but three colossal Great White Megalodons (plus a giant squid). Despite being a goofy movie about big sharks, the original film's VFX team took incredible care to make an anatomically correct and visually distinct Megalodon. That task is essentially tripled in Meg 2: The Trench, though the reported budget for the sequel is actually a million dollars less than its predecessor.

Filming Locations

Believe it or not, the cast and crew of Meg 2: The Trench did not actually travel to the depths of the ocean to film the blockbuster sequel. The trench base and ocean floor sets were reportedly created at Warner Bros. Discovery's studio in Burbank. Exterior shots were also conducted in China and Thailand.

The Costs of Promoting Meg 2: The Trench

Warner Bros. Discovery had their work cut out for them when marketing Summer's most prominent film, Barbie. That's not to say that Meg 2: The Trench got wholly left out, with a marketing campaign beginning about two months before its theatrical release. The series also got positive marketing synergy thanks to Discovery's annual Shark Week event. Overall, marketing campaigns for blockbusters like Meg 2: The Trench has a minimum advertising budget of $65 million, which is not included in the production budget.

How Much Does Meg 2: The Trench Need to Make to Break Even?

The total reported budget for Meg 2: The Trench is reportedly $129 million, which is about $1 million less than what The Meg costs to make. With a budget of $129 million and a marketing budget that likely ranges from $65 million to $100 million, Meg 2: The Trench will need to make somewhere between $194 million and $229 million to break even. Meg 2: The Trench will likely need to make $388 million to $458 million at the international box office to be considered a financial success.

While Barbenheimer's unprecedented success at the box office and prevented Meg 2: The Trench's opening weekend from being a total feeding frenzy, the shark sequel still took a considerable chomp in its theatrical debut. With a domestic take of about $35 million and a massive international total of over $145 million, Meg 2: The Trench has already made back its production budget and will likely break even as early as its second theatrical weekend. As of now, the film has made $384.9 million worldwide. A great hold considering not only competing with Barbie and Oppenheimer but also the likes of the superhero film Blue Beetle and the sports biopic Gran Turismo.

How Do Meg 2: The Trench's Box Office Projections Compare to Other Summer 2023 Blockbusters?

Summer 2023 has been an unusual season for the box office. Big-budget films like The Flash, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, and Haunted Mansion became unprecedented box office bombs, potentially losing more than a billion considering their budget.

Thankfully, Barbie and Oppenheimer came in to create an incredible double feature combo, shattering records with Barbie crossing the billion-dollar milestone and Oppenheimer repeatedly extending its 70mm theatrical run. While Meg 2: The Trench probably won't catch up to that dynamic duo, it's still looking like it will be one of the more impressively profitable films of this unusual blockbuster season.

via collider

Meg 3: Will the Shark Thriller Get a Threequel?

The thrilling success of Meg 2 at the box office and its recent release in August 2023 have ignited fervent stalment. Director Ben Wheatley’s expressed enthusiasm for the project further fuels the excitement among dedicated fans. With tantalizing possibilities on the horizospeculation and eager anticipation for a possible third inn, let’s dive into what we know about Meg 3 and what might await us in the next chapter of this shark-infested universe.

Potential Release Date for Meg 3: Patience is Key

While an official release date for Meg 3 is yet to be revealed, the franchise’s history suggests that eager fans might have to exercise patience. Given the recent release of the sequel and the essential time required for script development and production, it’s reasonable to anticipate a significant gap before the premiere of the third instalment. Despite the wait, the vast potential of unexplored content in the realm of ‘shark movies’ assures us that the delay will likely be well worth it.

As speculation suggests, a potential release date could be sometime around 2026 or beyond. The franchise’s enduring popularity and ample source material from Steve Alten’s book series create a strong case for continuing the saga.

Meg 2’s Impact on Meg 3: Setting the Stage

While Meg 2: The Trench did not feature post-credit scenes, it effectively laid the foundation for the story’s next phase. The sequel, focusing on the dynamic between humanity and the untamed ocean realm, introduced new elements with immense potential for future chapters. Fresh technologies and characters could seamlessly guide the narrative towards exciting and uncharted territories.

It’s anticipated that Meg 3 will draw inspiration from the 2004 novel Primal Waters, although it’s important to note that the films often take creative liberties with the source material. While specific plot details remain under wraps, the groundwork laid by Meg 2 hints at a thrilling continuation that promises to captivate audiences once again.

While the official cast lineup for Meg 3 has not been confirmed, casting decisions are often intricate due to scheduling constraints and other logistical factors. Assuming all the stars align, it’s reasonable to expect core cast members to reprise their roles. Jason Statham as Jonas Taylor, Page Kennedy as DJ, and Cliff Curtis as James “Mac” Mackreides are among those likely to return. Wu Jing as Jiuming, Sophia Cai as Meiying Zhang, and Kelly the Dog as Pippin could also make a comeback.

With the adversaries of Meg 2 meeting their fates, new and formidable characters may step into the spotlight, adding fresh dynamics to the story.

Trailers and Future Uncertainties: Waiting for the Next Glimpse

Currently, no trailers or footage are available for Meg 3. The fate of the third instalment hinges on the reception of Meg 2 and its ability to maintain the franchise’s competitive cinematic landscape. The expectation for a sequel to match the engagement and response of its predecessors, especially considering the time lapse since the initial release, adds an extra layer of challenge for the creators.

While the road ahead is uncertain, the enthusiasm and zeal surrounding Meg 3 are undeniably high. As developments emerge and updates are unveiled, fans can eagerly anticipate further information about the potential continuation of this thrilling and shark-filled saga.

via Open Sky

'Meg 2: The Trench' Makes Another Small Nibble in the Global Box Office

Another epic sequel is surely inevitable now.

THE BIG PICTURE

•  Meg 2: The Trench has made enough money at the box office to almost guarantee a third installment of the prehistoric underwater adventure.
•  Jason Statham brings his usual charm as the tough main character, Jonas Taylor, and his thrilling action scenes steal the show.
•  The film's international success and profitability make it a sensible decision for Warner Bros. to continue the franchise, as the demand for the movie is clear.

Meg 2: The Trench may be starting to swim in shallower waters at the worldwide box office, but the movie has taken enough of a financial chunk from audiences to all but assure a third installment of the prehistoric undersea nonsense, should it be so desired. In its sixth week of release, the movie brought in another $3.6 million from 77 overseas markets to bring its international total to $304.2 million, giving the movie a global running tally of $384.9 million.

 Via Collider

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Of Course, The Meg 2 Director Learned From Jaws While Making The Shark Flick, And His Description Of Steven Spielberg’s Age When He Did It Is Sticking With Me

(Image credit: Warner Bros/CBS)

When drawing inspiration for a movie like Meg 2: The Trench, it helps to seek out the classics. So naturally, director Ben Wheatley considered the entertainments of the classic summer blockbuster Jaws as he looked for lessons on what to do with his own entry into the aquatic horror-comedy canon. What’s even more interesting to read is how Wheatley described director Steven Spielberg when he made the 1975 movie, which is undoubtedly an explanation that’s going to stick with me for a while. 

During an interview with Slashfilm promoting the Jason Statham-fronted sequel, the High Rise director put a lot of influences on the table. That led to this rundown of where his inspirations came from, including a portrait of Spielberg that most people probably forgot.

Yeah, I mean, obviously I’m a fan of the Kaiju stuff and a fan of Gojira and then the later cycle of Godzilla movies like the ’70s stuff as well, and Harryhausen, Jason and the Argonauts, all that stuff. Obviously Jaws, which is not just a shark film, but one of the greatest films ever made for me. And a film I revisit a lot and re-watch, it’s a film that is a film school in itself. And to see that [Steven Spielberg] did it when he was 26 or whatever disgustingly young age he made that movie at, which is basically inventing it and so much stuff. I definitely looked at that.

At this point in his career, we see Steven Spielberg as the classic hit-maker who dances between dramas and blockbusters. However, people may forget the stories of how a young Spielberg bluffed his way onto the Universal lot, eventually paving the way to direct Jaws at the tender age of 26.

I’ll give you all a moment to sink into a rabbit hole dissecting what you were doing at that point in life, as that’s clearly what Ben Wheatley did during his Meg 2 prep. Also, I’m totally falling into that trap myself at the moment. 

While I might not agree with the words “disgustingly young,” I do co-sign the fact that Spielberg invented the modern summer blockbuster. At the same time, try not coming with your own shocked nickname when watching the trailer for Jaws and remembering that it was directed by a 26-year-old.

Reading the various behind-the-scenes facts on Jaws that have been revealed over time backs that claim, as well as the fact that Mr. Wheatley’s claim that the Indiana Jones helmer was pretty much making it up with his crew as they went along. Not to mention, he was sinking ships with his actors on board long before it was cool... or totally intentional and safe.

Making a movie like Meg 2: The Trench isn’t as risky in this age, as directors like Ben Wheatley now have all the practical models and CGI effects their budget will allow. Reading how much Wheatley was looking to Jaws for inspiration, it totally explains the kickass jet ski scene with Jason Statham, and how it too involved some practical magic itself.

It just goes to show that no matter what age you are, you can be inspired to pull some stunts that even the masters themselves would be proud of. You can see such delights pretty easily, as Meg 2: The Trench is still in theaters, but you can also rent it on PVOD if you’d rather enjoy it in the comfort of your own home. Meanwhile, if you have got the urge to revisit Jaws and/or its handful of sequels, those of you with a Netflix subscription can do just that.

via Cinemablend

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USA Today - November 2022 

New York Times Review: ‘Meg 2: The Trench’ Review: Gleefully Jumping the Shark

This lively sequel to 2018’s somewhat tepid killer-shark blockbuster greatly improves upon its predecessor by getting gorier, funnier and more stylish.The shak-hunting, ocean-protecting hero Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham) now has a stepdaughter to protect in “Meg 2: The Trench.”

Credit...

Warner Bros. Pictures/CMC Pictures

Meg 2: The Trench

Directed by Ben Wheatley

Action, Adventure, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller

PG-13

1h 56m

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A cute dog, an 8-year-old girl and countless sunbathing beachgoers survived “The Meg” (2018) miraculously unharmed. The British filmmaker Ben Wheatley, who steps into the director’s chair for “Meg 2: The Trench,” has racked up stomach-turning body counts (including dogs) in his darkly comic thrillers like “Down Terrace,” “Kill List” and “Free Fire,” so it seems only fair that his take on a killer-shark movie would lean a bit more vicious.

But “Meg 2,” like the first, maintains a box office-friendly PG-13 rating, so Wheatley is necessarily limited in how much carnage he is permitted to depict. Nevertheless, he finds many creative ways to butcher bad guys and side characters that hit the same horror-adjacent pleasure centers. There’s a shot from the point of view of a shark’s mouth as it’s eating people. I call that good directing.

The first “Meg,” with its story of a long-extinct carnivore re-emerging to wreak havoc among scientists, was reminiscent of “Jurassic Park.” “Meg 2” takes the natural next step and borrows from “The Lost World.” The shark-hunting, ocean-protecting hero Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham) now has a stepdaughter (Sophia Cai) to protect, while the repertoire of prehistoric predators on the hunt has been richly expanded to include several land-roaming dinosaurs and (why not?) a giant squid. Of course, any shark movie will inevitably live in the shadow of “Jaws.” Wheatley has fun with it by nodding playfully to “Jaws 2.”

The director having fun is the presiding feeling here — which may account for why the movie is so frequently amusing, and occasionally delightful. It has a light, irreverent tone that sometimes verges on parodic, as when a villain’s archly confident victory speech is disrupted by a shark appearance straight out of “Deep Blue Sea,” or when a splashy pink title card cheerfully informs us that the populated area about to be descended upon by a trio of sharks is called “Fun Island.” Just how close does the movie get to full-blown parody? At one point, Statham literally jumps a shark.

It’s not that the first “Meg” was particularly serious: It contained comic relief, but the humor felt more studio-mandated. “Meg 2” has a spark of wit that feels looser and more appropriate to the material. The supporting cast — especially Page Kennedy and Cliff Curtis as scientists forced to join the action — are offered much more freedom to cut loose and get silly, while certain sight gags have a verve that really pops (including an escalating bit that has more and more of our heroes wandering into the same armed holdup). No dogs come to harm in this one either, it should be said. There’s enough madcap mayhem elsewhere that any more would have been overkill.

Meg 2: The Trench
Rated PG-13 for intense action, mild language and excessive shark violence. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters.

via New York Times 

Nobody Ever Read American Literature Like This Guy Did

 Inflamed, impertinent and deeply insightful, D.H. Lawrence’s “Studies in Classic American Literature” remains startlingly relevant 100 years after it was originally published.

Every American is “a torn divided monster,” D.H. Lawrence wrote, in a book that saw in the nation’s literature a key to its soul.Credit...Fine Art Images/Heritage Images, via Getty Images

It has been a hundred years since D.H. Lawrence published “Studies in Classic American Literature,” and in the annals of literary criticism the book may still claim the widest discrepancy between title and content.

Not with respect to subject matter: As advertised, this compact volume consists of essays on canonical American authors of the 18th and 19th centuries — a familiar gathering of dead white men. Some (Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman) are still household names more than a century later, while others (Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Richard Henry Dana Jr.) have faded into relative obscurity. By the 1950s, when American literature was fully established as a respectable field of academic study, Melville’s “Moby-Dick,” Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter,” Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” and Crèvecoeur’s “Letters From an American Farmer” had become staples of the college and grad school syllabus, which is where I and many others found them in the later decades of the 20th century. Thank goodness Lawrence got there first.

This is not going to be one of those laments about how nobody reads the great old books anymore. Not many people read them when they first appeared, either. My point is that nobody ever read them like Lawrence did — as madly, as wildly or as insightfully.

That’s what I mean about the gap between the book and its title. “Studies in Classic American Literature” is as dull a phrase as any committee of professors could devise. Just try to say those five words without yawning. But look inside and you will be jolted awake.

Lawrence’s deep reading and idiosyncratic learning are abundantly evident — he tosses off snippets of French, German, Italian and Latin, sprinkling his pages with allusions to ancient poetry and modern philosophy — but his tone is the opposite of scholarly. With its one-sentence paragraphs (“Flop goes spiritual love.”), jabbing exclamations (“Freedom!”), semi-rhetorical questions (“But what of Walt Whitman?”) and heavy use of italics and all-caps, the book can read like a scroll of social-media rants. Its manner is neither respectable nor respectful. Lawrence harangues his subjects in the second person (“Nathaniel!”), and subjects them to parodic paraphrase and withering, ad hominem judgment. “I do not like him,” he says of Benjamin Franklin. Benjamin Franklin!

The irreverence is refreshing, but these studies are far from frivolous. Lawrence’s bristling, inflamed, impertinent language provides a reminder that criticism is not just the work of the brain, but of the gut and the spleen as well. The intellectual refinement of his argument — fine-grained evaluations of style and form that still startle with their incisiveness; breathtaking conceptual leaps from history to myth and back again — is unthinkable without the churn of instinct and feeling beneath it. This is the work of a writer whose fiction — including his briefly banned masterpiece “The Rainbow” and his long-suppressed “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” — makes much of the conflict between decorum and desire. 

In that respect, the book is the mirror of its subject. Each of the writers under scrutiny, like the culture that spawned them, is a divided soul, pulled between contrary impulses. On one side, there is a moralizing, do-gooding, civilizing imperative, a force that Lawrence variously identifies with idealism, “saviorism” and democracy, none of which he much cares for. Franklin is one avatar of this tendency — “the pattern American, this dry, moral, utilitarian little democrat” — which explains Lawrence’s dislike:

Here am I now in tatters and scratched to ribbons, sitting in the middle of Benjamin’s America looking at the barbed wire, and the fat sheep crawling under the fence to get fat outside, and the watchdogs yelling at the gate lest by chance anyone should get out by the proper exit. Oh America! Oh Benjamin! And I utter a long loud curse against Benjamin and the American corral.

But Franklin is not the only American writer bound by the constraints of careful morality. Even the wildest of Lawrence’s specimens — the feverish Edgar Allan Poe, the restless Melville, the ecstatic Whitman — are corralled by various forms of propriety and high-minded sentiment.

The thorniest part of Lawrence’s argument — the strain in the book that feels scandalous, even dangerous, at present — is that he identifies those sentiments with what many Americans would consider the positive substance of our national identity. His hostility to the idea of democracy and the ideal of equality partly reflects a general philosophical bias. “Damn all ideas and all ideals,” he rails, seeing such abstraction as an impediment to authentic human connection: “If only people would meet in their very selves.” But this idea of authenticity is bound up with a mystical ideology of race, sex, blood and destiny that is apt to trouble 21st-century sensibilities.

Or maybe not. Like some other modernist writers — W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis — Lawrence, who died in 1930, dabbled in a mode of aesthetic anti-liberalism that may be making a comeback. His critique of America, where he had traveled in the early 1920s, living for a time in Taos, N.M., was a broadside against the nation’s progressive traditions. Its writers were both his antagonists and his allies. Or rather, their expressed beliefs were anathema, while their work revealed what to him was a more congenial truth.

“The artist,” he writes in one of the most frequently quoted passages, “usually sets out — or used to — to point a moral and adorn a tale. The tale, however, points the other way, as a rule. Two blankly opposing morals, the artist’s and the tale’s. Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.”

The tale that classic American literature tells, in the aggregate, is largely one of violence, conflict and cruelty, whether it unfolds on Cooper’s frontier, in Hawthorne’s Salem, in Poe’s fantastical mansions or on Melville’s South Seas. There is a remorseless clarity to Lawrence’s perception of this bloody tapestry, summed up in his description of Cooper’s Natty Bumppo:

But you have there the myth of the essential white America. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer. It has never yet melted.

This is a hard formulation to accept, but it is also not an easy one to dismiss. Much as we may wish to deny it, racial violence is a central fact of our history. And as distasteful as it may be to imagine this country defined by Cooper’s “essential American” on one hand and Franklin’s industrious, positive-thinking “pattern American” on the other, the tension between them might be more than just a literary conceit. Without it, American literature might not exist at all.

What Lawrence saw in his eccentric, passionate reading of that literature was division, polarization and contradiction. Not so much among factions, parties, regions or races — ordinary politics doesn’t really enter his field of vision — as within individual hearts and the collective soul. Every American is “a torn divided monster,” he writes at one point.

And elsewhere, a century ago that might as well have been last week: “America has never been easy, and is not easy today.”

via A.O. Scott 

Critic at large for the Book Review. He joined The Times in 2000 and was a film critic until early 2023. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism."More about A.O. Scott"