Caffeinated Clint
"The Ring 2" will be both a prequel and a sequel, according to producer Walter Parkes. While talking to Sci Fi Wire Parkes said "[The] Godfather is the greatest movie ever made, and The Ring is not, but they are both about the creation of a fascinating monster," Parkes said in an interview. "You were fascinated at the creation of Michael [and Vito] Corleone, and I think you’re fascinated by this little girl Samara and where she came from. For that reason, I thought, like [Godfather II], maybe we could look forward and look backwards. So we’re trying to make arrangements with [director] Gore [Verbinski] and [writer] Ehren [Kruger], who worked on the first one. We just have to roll up our sleeves and get going on it quickly."
Parkes said that he doesn’t want to make only a prequel. "Unfortunately, I don’t know any prequels that quite work as well as sequels do," Parkes said. "Red Dragon was a little disappointing. It didn’t make $100 million. There’s an interesting prequel to be made, which has to do with the parents who give birth to Samara and what happens. That was so beautifully explored in Rosemary’s Baby, the kind of anticipation you have about giving birth to a first child and your fears and hopes and all of that, and what happens if this child has powers? There’s something really interesting in all that."
The Japanese film on which The Ring was based was followed by both a sequel and a prequel, upon which Parkes hopes to improve in the American counterpart. "They did a prequel and a sequel in Japan, and both of them are very narratively unsatisfying," Parkes said. "What was interesting about The Ring was that it was equal parts conventional Western horror movie and equal parts very particular ambiguous Japanese mystical spiritual experience. But it had enough of both to be very delicious. Now that people know the secret of Samara and know what the videotape does, it’s going to be very hard to invent something which is as fresh as the first one, but [that] also carries forward that kind of duality. We’re going to try, though." Parkes added that he hopes to recruit Ring stars Naomi Watts and Daveigh Chase to reprise their roles in the sequel.
