Doug Liman’s Edge of Tomorrow sequel, maddeningly titled Live Die Repeat and Repeat (as a reference to the first movie’s “Live. Die. Repeat.” tagline), is probably going to be even more mind-bendingly weird than its predecessor. While talking about it recently, Liman revealed that the movie is “a sequel that’s a prequel,” whatever that means, and it’ll also have a fun new characters that’s going to “steal the movie.”

During an appearance on MTV’s Happy Sad Confused podcast, Liman spoke about how he’s taking a more toned-down approach with his sequel — going smaller instead of bigger.

I think what people tend to do with sequels is they just make them bigger. And I’m like, ‘No, a sequel should be smaller.’ You did the first film as sort of the ad campaign for the sequel, so now you don’t need as much action, and in the case of Edge of Tomorrow, people obviously loved the comedy and they loved the situation … so we can do way more focus on Tom’s character and Emily Blunt’s character, and there’s a third character in the sequel that’s gonna for sure steal the movie. We can focus on that. I don’t need an action sequence every two minutes.

He’s right on the money that the funny parts of Edge of Tomorrow are some of its best scenes, especially during the training montage where Emily Blunt keeps having to kill Tom Cruise when he messes up in order to reset the timeline. Liman was mum on who, or what, this new character is, just as he’s mum on exactly what the plot of the sequel is going to be.

I see this as a two-movie franchise; there’s the completion of the story we set up in the first movie and the relationships between Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt—because, remember, at the end of the first movie, she doesn’t know who he is—and that’s gonna launch us into an amazing new direction.

It does pick up right where we left off, but it doesn’t keep going forward, because we’d screw with time, because the aliens screwed with time.

Okay, so, it sounds like we’ll be going back in time again, maybe to the middle of the war, or even slightly before, to see what Cruise and Blunt’s Major William Cage and Sergeant Rita Vrataski get up to before they meet each other.

It’s mostly not on the battlefield, so there’s a whole new arena of fights we’re going to do using a lot of the technology, but also, because it is a prequel, it’s a lot of the precursor stuff. I’m really interested in the details of that … Like batteries, do they run out on these suits? I mean, they must have batteries. Or he gets stuck with the menu in the wrong language, just the reality of that menu stuck in the wrong language when you’re in the middle of a battlefield and aliens are all around you and you gotta get the suit working again, that detail gives you drama and excitement. And humor. In the sequel, I’m creating an environment where I get to have even more of those details.

My theory is that either Cage or Vrataski gets the bright idea to try and use the aliens like they used them before, to send them back in time to before the war even starts, and try to stop it that way. Plus, Cage has the added stress of trying to convince Vrataski that she knows him, maybe not in this timeline, but in countless timelines before. There’s a lot Liman can do with this concept, and I’m really excited to see where he ends up going with it.

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