Warning. Spoilers for Glass follow…
Almost twenty years after the release of Unbreakable, filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan completed his Eastrail 177 Trilogy this past week with Glass, the sequel to the 2000 superhero thriller and 2016’s second instalment Split.
As those who’ve seen Glass will know, the movie’s big reveal is that Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson) isn’t just a psychiatrist, but is in fact part of a secret society conspiring to keep the existence of superhumans secret from the world. However, her plan fails thanks to Elijah, and the film concludes with this knowledge exposed to the general public – an ending that Shyamalan originally envisioned back when he was making Unbreakable.
“I did. I didn’t know if I could have the balls to do it. But I did, the filmmaker tells THR. “That was in my head and I kind of said, ‘Maybe we could do this at the end’ and chuckled about it. Can you do that? I didn’t know whether I’d have the fortitude to keep going and do it, but I’m so glad that I did. Closure is important to me, as a narrator, as a storyteller. How do we get to a definitive end so that you understood someone had something to say specifically and not then continuing. It’s always been on my mind how to do this. Obviously, I’ve never done a sequel before and wanting to make sure it was from the right motivations, from the characters themselves and that world and keeping a certain level of purity about it. I think that the shelf life of the three movies will increase dramatically because of it.”
SEE ALSO: M. Night Shyamalan self-financed The Visit, Split and Glass
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Following the conclusion of Split, Glass finds Dunn pursuing Crumb’s superhuman figure of The Beast in a series of escalating encounters, while the shadowy presence of Price emerges as an orchestrator who holds secrets critical to both men. This riveting culmination of his worldwide blockbusters will be produced by Shyamalan and Jason Blum.
Glass sees the return of Bruce Willis (David Dunn), Samuel L. Jackson (Elijah Price), Spencer Treat Clark (Joseph Dunn) and Charlayne Woodard (Mrs. Price) from Unbreakable and James McAvoy (Kevin Wendell Crumb) and Anya Taylor-Joy (Casey Cooke) from Split, while Sarah Paulson (American Horror Story) also stars.