A Long-Anticipated Taika Waititi Sequel Finally Has A Promising Update
But it still might take a while.
Taika Waititi may be well-known today, but he was once a breakout New Zealand filmmaker best known for his work with Flight of the Conchords and an indie rom-com called Eagle Vs. Shark. That changed with What We Do in the Shadows, a low-budget, mostly improvised mockumentary that put Kiwi vampires front and center. The movie, which starred Waititi and his longtime collaborator Jemaine Clement, became a festival darling that launched Waititi into the blockbuster director he is today.
The movie’s legacy continued with two TV spinoffs: Wellington Paranormal, a police-based supernatural comedy, and What We Do in the Shadows, an American sitcom version of the original story. But before both of those, there was a much-anticipated sequel movie idea that’s finally picking up some steam.
The pack of werewolves — not swearwolves — led by Anton.
In 2015, Jemaine Clement let it slip that he and Waititi were considering a sequel film to What We Do in the Shadows. Focusing on the group of werewolves led by Rhys Darby’s Anton, the movie was originally known as What We Do in the Moonlight, but that was soon changed to We’re Wolves.
Clement and Waititi have occasionally been asked about the sequel as their stars rose, but it would always be described as a dream project. “We're Wolves is the film that Jemaine and I keep pretending that we're making,” Waititi told IndieWire in 2019. “Every couple of years we say, we're making this new film called We're Wolves which follows the werewolves from the film. I feel bad to even mention it now because we keep saying it, [but] it's like a dad saying, ‘Yeah, I'll be home for Christmas.’”
Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement are finally revisiting one of their most beloved projects.
As time went on and Waititi’s list of movies stuck in development hell grew to include an Akira reboot, a Star Wars movie, and a movie based on the life of Michael Jackson’s pet chimp Bubbles, fans started to lose hope that We’re Wolves would ever actually happen. But while promoting his new animated movie, Kiri and Lou Go Raaa! at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, Jemaine Clement told Collider that, against all odds, the writing for We’re Wolves has finally begun. “We're writing it, actually. We started writing,” he said. “For a long time, we were just talking about it. Now, we've started it. Very recently.”
This isn’t a project likely to be fast-tracked, as Clement said he works on the script whenever his and Taika Waititi’s schedules align. But the first movie took six years to make, and fans have waited patiently for the sequel, so what’s another couple of years at this point? Like vampires, a fandom’s love is undying.
