With the release of Glass, M. Night Shyamalan has finally completed the alternative superhero movie trilogy he started 19 years ago with Unbreakable, and Screen Rant’s Ryan George is here to reveal how the pitch meeting (probably) went down.
Though he’s had a career of ups and downs, Shyamalan recently made a bit of a comeback with two solidly good movies: The Visit, in which two kids go to stay with the maternal grandparents they’ve never met; and Split, in which three girls are kidnapped by a man with dissociative identity disorder, who is planning to sacrificing them to a terrifying new personality called The Beast. Shyamalan is, of course, famous for his twists, and the twist at the end of Split was that it was actually set in the same universe as Shyamalan’s 2000 thriller Unbreakable.
Glass closes out the trilogy by uniting three characters with extraordinary abilities. There’s Mr. Glass (Samuel L. Jackson), who has an oversized intellect and an obsession with comic books. There’s Split’s Kevin Crumb and his many other personalities, including the super-powered Beast. Finally there’s David Dunn (Bruce Willis), who is impervious to harm, enabling him to pull off incredible feats like smashing his way through a steel door. Let’s go behind the scenes of the pitch meeting for Glass, to find out how this incredibly weird movie and its many plot holes got made.
What a twist! Yes, Shyamalan did in fact finance Glass himself. He started by taking out a $5 million loan on his property to finance The Visit, then used the profits from The Visit to finance Split, and then used the money he made from the previous two movies (as well as putting up more of his Pennsylvania estate as collateral) to raise the $20 million needed for Glass’ production budget. And while the reviews haven’t been great, Shyamalan’s investment definitely paid off, as Glass has already grossed more than $162 million at the box office.
Now that the trilogy is complete, Shyamalan’s next movie project will probably be Labor of Love, a film about a recently widowed man who goes on an epic walk from Philadelphia to Pacifica, California in order to prove his love for his late wife. The movie was announced back in 2014 and at the time it was reported that Willis was likely to play the lead role. Who knows - perhaps Labor of Love will actually turn out to be a sequel to Glass, with the cross-country walk taking place in the afterlife following David Dunn’s death. No one would see the Bruce-Willis-is-a-ghost twist coming a second time!
