More Riddick Than You Ever Wanted

Vin Diesel feels comfortable as Riddick. Very comfortable. 

Vin Diesel, out on the town doing publicity for this week’s Babylon A.D. told the MTV Movies Blog that there are plans on the way to film two more movies featuring his Riddick character from Pitch Black and The Chronicles of Riddick.

(By the way, right now feels like the producers of Babylon A.D. bought the most television commercial time ever; I’m sure that isn’t true, but I think  I’ve seen 18 commercials an hour for this movie over the last two weeks or so. And they don’t get better on repeated viewing.)

 Diesel explains it all:

“David Twohy right now is writing the scripts. The only question is whether we take a page from the ‘Lord of the Rings’ guys and try to shoot the two chapters at the same time. There are two more in mind,” he said of Riddick, the Furyan warrior first introduced in the 2000 film “Pitch Black.” “‘The Chronicles of Riddick’ was presented as a three part trilogy that would answer ‘Pitch Black’ in the same way that ‘Lord of the Rings’ answered ‘The Hobbit.’”

Hmmm…a comparison to LOTR. Interesting. Of course one differene is that the LOTR books and movies were enormously successful, while The Chronicles of Riddick was not. Pitch Black was fine, but Chronicles was a case of the makers of a low-budget, low-profile film being given lots more money and getting out of control. It got terrible reviews and didn’t do well at the box office. So it would seem that two more movies would be a somewhat risky proposition.

Diesel is high on it the project, though. He says:

“Everyone knows I love the Riddick character and I’m always working on it. It just takes five years to make another one because David Twohy and I are so precious about it.”

He also could use a hit and returning to a familiar character must seem like a pretty good idea; he’s also reprising his role from The Fast and the Furious in what already seems like a lock for most intriguing movie title of the year: Fast and Furious. They removed the articles from the original title, and voila! A new movie! Who’d a thunk it?