Caffeinated Clint
But is anyone else?
In an online chat with readers of the VanDammeFan.net site, filmmaker Sheldon Lettich touched on the possibility of a sequel to one of the Muscles from Brussels’s earlier efforts, “Double Impact” (yeah, the one where he played twins).
Says Lettich, “The story that JC and I always talked about would begin with Chad getting in trouble with a Chinese Triad gang in Los Angeles (which has a huge Chinese population), and Alex having to come from Hong Kong to help him out. Alex, of course, would be a fish-out-of-water, bull-in-a-china-shop in L.A., kind of like Crocodile Dundee or like Jackie Chan in RH2.
‘’The problem we’ve always had was that the rights are all over the place. This is because the original copyright owner was Stone Group, a now-defunct company that was partly owned by Michael Douglas and partly owned by Moshe Diamant. Moshe’s half was seized by Credit Lyonnais Bank a number of years ago, due to some financial improprieties on Moshe’s behalf.
‘’The movie was released by Columbia Pictures in the US (which is now, of course, Sony), but the North American DVD rights later ended up being in the hands of MGM. In Europe and Asia the film was released by various companies, and the DVD’s were oftentimes distributed by entirely different companies. It’s all beginning to sound quite confusing, isn’t it?
‘’I actually had a meeting with the people who run MGM’s direct-to-DVD division a couple months ago. The executive I was meeting with is a big “Double Impact” fan. He thought that MGM owned the rights (since they were distributing the DVD in the US), and he was excited by the prospect of making a sequel also. But I told him not to get too excited, not until his Legal Department tracked down the status of the underlying rights. Once they did their research, they realized just how big of a mess this rights situation had become. The moral of that little anecdote is: even the executives at MGM didn’t know.’’
