Neill Blomkamp Wants an ‘Elysium’ Sequel, Says He Can ‘Do It Better’

Elysium is far from Neill Blomkamp’s finest hour — I’ll even bet money that he made Chappie so that the general public would forget about how much they hated that movie were Matt Damon and Sharlto Copley beat each other up while wearing mechanical exoskeletons on a space station reserved only for rich people. But it’s human nature to want to improve upon your failures, and Blomkamp is, as far as we know, a human, so it’s no surprise that he’d want to have another crack at it.

Blomkamp recently told ScreenRant that he would have liked to work on the story of Elysium in an environment like his Oats Studios, which he’s currently using to explore other concepts and ideas for sci-fi properties in the form of short films.

Elysium is more something I feel like I could have done better. I think that if you were to take something like Elysium and play with it inside a setting like this [his Oats Studios short films] you probably would hone it – you would end up, I think, with something well thought through and that has all of the thematic elements that I wanted. I still love the set up to Elysium. The idea of the separation of class warfare presented with this space ring is incredibly appealing to me and I would love to go back and make another movie in the world of Elysium because it’s compelling. I just think I can do a better job in setting up what the themes are more clearly and what the character’s motivations are. I can do it better, I think.

Neill… buddy… I dunno. Maybe as a short film something as heavyhanded as Elysium could have worked, but the class conflict metaphor central to the story is already cliché in sci-fi by now. Blomkamp does seem to understand that the movie was Very Bad, and I admire his desire to improve upon an idea he really likes, but I’d much rather he kept doing his Oats Studios thing and worked more on short films until he has a newer, cooler idea to expand upon.