Tradecraft: xXx Rides Again

Xander Cage will return again. Apparently, you just can't keep an extreme spy down! Variety reported on Tuesday that a fourth film featuring Vin Diesel's extreme sports athlete turned secret agent will go before cameras this December, with xXx: Return of Xander Cage director D.J. Caruso returning at the helm. To make this possible, Diesel's One Race Films and Chinese-backed, U.S.-based finance and production company The H Collective have acquired the xXx franchise rights from Revolution Studios, who produced the first three films. Revolution will retain its rights to those movies, and Diesel & Co. can proceed with the further adventures of Xander Cage.

If you guessed that the reason for this sequel happening was China, you'd be right. (We heard as much a year ago.) Said The H Collective CEO Nic Crawley, "The response from the Chinese box office [to the third film] was unprecedented. Bringing the next installment of the xXx franchise to The H Collective complements our diversified slate and mission to produce content for a global audience." Deadline added some further financial details, pointing out that while the first three films have collectively grossed nearly a billion dollars, their popularity has waned Stateside. The original xXx raked in $142.1 million domestically in 2002; the latest one topped out at $44.8 million domestically in 2017. But it set box office records in China, pulling in more than $164 million in the Middle Kingdom and contributing mightily to its $346.1 million worldwide haul. This, of course, was the intention; in his third outing Xander was backed up by a diverse, Fast & Furious-style team of international stars, including Chinese box office idols Donnie Yen (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story) and Kris Wu (Journey to the West: The Demons Strike Back), who were both featured heavily in advertising there. There's no official word yet on any cast beyond Diesel, but it seems like a good bet that those Chinese stars will be back as well. (Personally, I'd like to see Indian actress Deepika Padukone and Aussie Ruby Rose return, too. They were highlights of the last movie.)

While the first two xXx movies were distributed by Sony (where Revolution Studios had their deal at the time), the third was released by Paramount. Yesterday, Deadline ran a second story shedding some light on the fourth film's possible distributor. It looks like Xander Cage will be headed back to Sony. The trade reported that The H Collective has made a pact with Sony for the studio to distribute up to four of their films per year. xXx 4 (or whatever it's ultimately called) will likely be a flagship title among those films. So one day, xXx: Return of Xander Cage may well be the odd title left out of Blu-ray (or whatever format we're on by then) box sets... the Return of the Pink Panther of the xXx series. if you will.

While I had little interest, initially, in seeing the return of an extreme hero so firmly (and hilariously) rooted in such a specific time as the heady, Mountain Dew-fueled X Games era of 2002, xXx: Return of Xander Cage caught me by surprise with a ridiculous but effective reinvention that proved the definition of dumb fun. There's something amusing about watching a 50-year-old man in Capri pants do skateboard tricks and hit on twenty-somethings... it all felt very Octopussy to me. (Which I should clarify I mean as a compliment, as others might not.) I think Caruso proved he's the right person to spearhead another xXx movie. I just hope there's more of Ice Cube and Samuel L. Jackson in the next one...

Tradecraft: Has China Saved Xander Cage?

Despite being a more fun film than the previous entries in the series, xXx: Return of Xander Cage underperformed at the domestic box office. Hardly surprising, really, when you consider it's been twelve years since the last franchise entry, and fifteen years since the last one starring Vin Diesel. But All-American Extreme Sports Hero Xander Cage just might live to skate again, thanks to the People's Republic of China. Variety reports that the film is on target to earn more that its cumulative domestic take to date in its opening weekend alone in the Middle Kingdom.

New xXx Trailer Showcases Extreme Women

The latest trailer for the latest entry in a franchise that started out as a Vin Diesel vehicle highlights two of the many people who aren't Vin Diesel in Paramount's xXx: Return of Xander Cage. Ruby Rose, 30, and Nina Dobrev, 27, take center stage from 49-year-old Diesel in this spot clearly aimed at millennials rather than the Mountain Dew-guzzling Gen Y audience of the original xXx, reinforcing that this is a team movie like the recent hit Fast & Furious flicks (or Paramount's own recent Mission: Impossible movies), and not a solo star vehicle like The Last Witch Hunter. Works for me. As much as I disliked the first two entries, I can't help getting a little excited about this one....

New xXx Trailer and Posters

Here's the second trailer for xXx: The Return of Xander Cage, which opens in January. I'll let Vin summarize the revival of 2002's 2002-iest spy franchise: "The good... the extreme... and the completely insane! Now that's a team I can work with!" Because those are the qualities the NSA looks for! (Do you think xXx will still work for the NSA? 2002 was the year Hollywood conspired to make audiences believe that secret agency employed shitkickers like Vin Diesel, Halle Berry and Michael Madsen, but will anyone believe that in today's post-Snowden world where most people now actually know what the NSA is and expect its employees to be a little more pasty-faced and slightly less X Games-y?)



Back in 2002, the ridiculousness of the premise annoyed me. Today, I have to admit, I can't help smiling ear to ear at that very ridiculousness, and especially at the sheer earnestness of said ridiculousness! Also at the fact that there is now a movie poster in the world depicting Toni Collette (Muriel's Wedding, Unlocked) as a badass superspy. There are twelve of these character posters in total, most featuring various muscly bearded men in fedoras with names that probably mean something to a generation much cooler (and presumably more extreme) than my own. You can see them all at Imp Awards. Surprisingly there isn't one for Samuel L. Jackson, who played a key role in both of the original xXx movies. It does look from the trailer like he might be moving on to an emeritus role and passing the torch to Collette as the extreme agent's primary handler. Perhaps now that Jackson is the real Nick Fury, he no longer feels compelled to play Fake Nick Furies? Sigh. I miss the days of Fake Nick Furies. Charlton Heston was the best one, of course, but Angelina Jolie actually made a pretty good one in Sky Captain.... Forgive me; I've gotten extremely off topic. Get it?!

Trailer: xXx: The Return of Xander Cage

This trailer is hilarious. It audaciously dares to proclaim that "the world has changed" (recalling the Dunston Checks In trailer more than the GoldenEye trailer of that same year, which itself claimed "It's a new world...") and "the war we're fighting today needs a different kind of soldier." And then it gives us very much the same kind of soldier we saw in 2002's xXx--extreme athlete cum superspy Xander Cage (Vin Diesel). I mean, that's such a 2002 concept, right? I suppose the world of espionage cinema has in fact changed since 2002--quite substantially. But you wouldn't know it from this trailer!

2002 was a watershed year for the spy movie. It was the year of the last Pierce Brosnan James Bond movie, Die Another Day. And the year of the first Jason Bourne movie, The Bourne Identity. One was clearly a dinosaur, the last hurrah of the 90s spy movie. And the other was the quintessential post-9/11 paranoid action thriller that ushered in a whole new style of screen spying. And despite its corny attempts to differentiate itself from James Bond (a Bond surrogate found himself in over his head in the opening scene, wearing a tuxedo to a club full of grungy, tattooed Millennials), xXx was very much a remnant of that same Paleozoic era as Die Another Day. Since then, subsequent Bourne films and the reinvented 007 of Daniel Craig completely shook up the genre in the very way the original xXx so transparently, desperately wanted to. But this trailer for the latest xXx movie willfully ignores all that, willing audiences instead to accept that it's still 2002. (The only indication that this Xander Cage movie takes place in contemporary, post-Daniel Craig times is a shot of Vin Diesel coming out of the water in the same pose as Craig did in Casino Royale.) And you know? You've kind of got to respect it for that. Part of me does, indeed, yearn for a return to those 90s dinosaur spy movies. (Note to studios: dinosaur spy movie! Make it happen.)

"We need people with the skills and the attitude to take on threats we don't even know exist," says Samuel L. Jackson's NSA honcho Augustus Gibbons in this trailer, echoing exactly what he said in the first two movies. Threats like extreme athletes bent on world domination. Threats requiring a grown man in diaper-white Capri pants to skateboard, and, we're told (though I remain dubious based on the evidence provided) "look dope doing it." Basically, the sort of threats you saw in Mountain Dew commercials aired during the X Games circa '02.

But ludicrous as it all is, I can't help get kind of excited about it... precisely for that ludicrousness. As I did for the previous two xXx movies--and ended up disappointed both times. But maybe, just maybe, the same magic that transformed Diesel's Fast & Furious movies into great entertainment will rub off on his other franchise. Maybe. Because, come on! Skiing through the jungle is actually a pretty damn cool basis for a setpiece! And it's been nearly three decades since we've seen a cool ski sequence in a real Bond film.

New xXx Cast Shapes Up; Will Ice Cube Join Vin Diesel in Extreme Sequel?

The cast for the third xXx movie (Vin Diesel's second, representing a return to the franchise he originated) is firming up. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Toni Collette (who will next be seen spying in Michael Apted's Unlocked) is the latest actor to join a cast that already includes Diesel, Jet Li (The Expendables), Tony Jaa (the awesome The Protector), Nina Dobrev (The Vampire Diaries), Ruby Rose (Orange Is the New Black), Bollywood beauty Deepika Padukone (Chennai Express) and Samuel L. Jackson, reprising his pre-Nick Fury role as Fake Nick Fury Augustus Gibbons. On top of those confirmed players, Moviehole (via Dark Horizons) has a very interesting rumor. It's possible that xXx 2: State of the Union star Ice Cube might also be back, joining Vin Diesel's Xander Cage (who was reported dead in the Cube movie) for the third film in the series. The website reports that "the plan seems to be for the xXx franchise to take it’s cue from the later Fast & Furious movies – acknowledge what’s come before, but make sure the characters from the earlier, weaker movies have something more to do this time around." That notion could jibe with the scant story details provided in the THR story: "insiders say it involves two teams of badasses that go head-to-head." Could we end up seeing the two extreme athlete agents (Cube's Darius Stone was chosen to succeed Cage because he had "even more attitude," a quality the NSA seemed to think made for good operatives) facing off against one another – and presumably ultimately teaming up to square off against a bigger threat? D.J. Caruso (Eagle Eye) is at the helm of xXx3: The Return of Xander Cage, which has a script by F. Scott Frazier (The Numbers Station). Shooting is expected to get underway soon, with locations including Toronto, Iceland and the Dominican Republic.

Tradecraft: Potential for Even More xXx Sequels and Spinoffs

The xXx franchise began life as a 2002 movie starring Vin Diesel as an extreme sports athlete turned spy. Diesel didn't return for the 2005 sequel xXx: State of the Union, but co-star Samuel L. Jackson did in his proto-Nick Fury role as eye-patched spymaster Augustus Gibbons. This time around Gibbons recruited Ice Cube as an agent with even more attitude than Diesel's Xander Cage. (Because everyone knows that the number one factor making a good agent is attitude!) So that movie could qualify as either a sequel or a spinoff. But since it underperformed at the box office, the xXx franchise has nestled itself nicely into a happy existence as a relic of the early 2000s. Now, after a decade of exactly no one clamoring for any further sequels or spinoffs... we suddenly find ourselves facing the prospect of both! In August, Vin Diesel announced that a sequel, xXx: The Return of Xander Cage, would start shooting in December. (He reiterated that intention this week, though there have still been no director or supporting cast announcements.) On top of that, Deadline reported on Thursday that "Revolution Studios has entered into a multi-project agreement with Universal 1440 Entertainment, the production arm of Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, to create new, non-theatrical productions based on properties in Revolution’s film library." Among the properties included in the pact... you guessed, it xXx! So we could potentially be seeing new theatrical xXx movies with Xander Cage and new direct-to-DVD (by which, of course, now I mean direct to multiple platforms) xXx spinoff movies featuring other extreme athletes or spies with attitude. (If they are all about original xXx co-star Asia Argento, I will suddenly become a lot more interested!) It should be noted, of course, that just because they can make direct-to-DVD xXx spinoff movies (akin to their very successful Scorpion King franchise) doesn't mean that Universal will make them. The Mission: Impossible franchise was once in contention for the direct-to-DVD treatment from Paramount (during the period of Tom Cruise's falling out with the studio), and of course that never happened.

xXx 3 to Shoot in December?

Rumors of a third xXx movie have abounded for as long as I've had this blog. Vin Diesel starred in the vapid 2002 original, only to have his character, extreme sports athlete turned spy Xander Cage (if you think the early 2000s are still too recent to be dated, meditate for a moment on the phrase "extreme sports athlete turned spy!") unceremoniously killed off in a DVD special feature. (Which has to be just about the most insulting way ever to off a character!) He was replaced in the even more vapid 2005 sequel, xXx: State of the Union, by Ice Cube. Since at least 2008, all the rumors of a third movie have focused on Diesel returning to the franchise, despite his character's ignominious death. And since 2013, Diesel himself has been banging the drum loudest for that to happen. And yesterday he banged pretty loudly, stating in an Instagram post (reported by Collider, via Empire) that "While I was filming XXX, guys on set called me Air Diesel... The time to return has come. Filming starts December in the Philippines." Will the threequel actually come to pass this time? While Rob Cohen, who helmed the original, had at one point flirted with returning, no director has been formally announced. But there's still time for such an announcement between now and December.

While it's true that the series has yet to produce a movie that's actually any good, I'm still kind of excited for a new entry. After all, Diesel's other big franchise, The Fast and the Furious, only really came to life with the fifth movie, suddenly becoming so much more than what it had been! If Diesel could entice the director who enlivened that series, Justin Lin, to similarly vivify xXx, I would honestly expect greatness. (But Lin, who was attached to a second Jeremy Renner Bourne movie which now seems to be history, is currently doing the next Star Trek, and consequently won't be free in December.) Still, I'm at least mildly intrigued at the prospect of more Xander Cage.

In a mostly unrelated, non-Diesel xXx coincidence, I have to admit that the ever so brief footage of Ice Cube in xXx: State of the Union included in the spectacular Straight Outta Compton (a movie everyone should see, regardless of their interest in or familiarity with NWA) actually made me kind of want to watch Lee Tamahori's terrible sequel again. I know it will still be terrible, but maybe the decade since has made it also kind of fun. Maybe?