Liam Neeson will be back on the big screen as Bryan Mills in Taken 3 next January, Arnold Schwarzenegger has Terminator: Genisys coming out in Summer 2015, and Sylvester Stallone is training in anticipation of Rambo 5 being his next movie. That is to say, being part of the 60 and Over Club is far from a problem for established action stars nowadays. Heck, Denzel Washington joins that club this December and yet his upcoming vehicle The Equalizer could give the Oscar-winner his first action franchise.
So really, it doesn’t come as a shock that Pierce Brosnan – who hung up his 007 hat twelve years ago with Die Another Day – is jumping back into the spy action/thriller pool, with his role as ex-CIA op Peter Devereaux in The November Man (which opens in theaters next week). November Man is based on the novel “There Are No Spies”, which is the seventh installment in the book series written by the late Bill Granger.
More than a dozen November Man novels were penned by Granger in total; which is to say, there’s plenty of source material to be drawn from, should the upcoming Brosnan vehicle perform well enough at the box office to justify it getting the franchise treatment. Relativity Studios, as it were, is wasting no time on getting a sequel rolling down the line, based on the expectation that the mid-range budgeted Brosnan film will ultimately prove to be a profitable venture.
Relativity Studios has announced that a November Man movie sequel will be entering pre-production in the near future (assuming the first installment doesn’t bomb), while Relativity President of Production Robbie Brenner issued an official statement where he says that the studio is excited “to continue to explore Peter Devereaux’s dangerous world with Pierce over the years to come.” In other words, the studio would be more than happy to churn out multiple sequels to this property, should the first movie prove to be a sufficient hit.
November Man, which Brenner has described as a combination of “the best elements of James Bond and Jason Bourne [and] the cool, sleek action movies of the 70s,” follows Brosnan’s retired spy character, Peter Devereaux, as he returns to the fold, in order to undertake a “very personal mission” – one that requires him to protect a young woman (Olga Kurylenko), but also pits Devereaux against his former pupil (Luke Bracey).
Judging by the trailer, November Man could be a perfectly serviceable B-movie thriller (if not much else), thanks to its leading man and director Ronald Donaldson, who previously collaborated with Brosnan on disaster thriller Dante’s Peak in the 1990s. November Man was also shot in the countries of Serbia and Montenegro, so it ought to have a distinguishable international flavor – something that may help at the global box office. Indeed, so long as the movie does business on par with, say, The Transporter franchise in the U.S., it may be enough to justify making a sequel.
Who knows, maybe November Man will allow Brosnan to successfully re-invent himself as an older and gruffer, yet still posh and cultured action hero type. The actor has already made it known that he’s game to join the Expendables franchise, should his second-wave action movie career takeoff.
