‘London Has Fallen’, the sequel to last year’s ‘Olympus Has Fallen’ ran into trouble recently when director Fredrik Bond quit the project in mid-September with only six weeks before shooting was scheduled to begin. But it appears that star Gerard Butler and the rest of the production team had settled on a replacement, and are in negotiations to strike a deal with the Iranian-born director Babak Najafi who lives in Sweden.
If they come to an agreement, shooting should begin on-time in London this week. The expected release date is October 2, 2015, according to hollywoodreporter.
Born in 1975 in Tehran, Najafi went to Sweden in the mid 80s. Following some short films, he made his first feature film Sebbe, which won the Best Debut Film at the 60th Berlin International Film Festival in 2010. He has also directed episodes of Banshee, an action-packed US TV drama. In 2012 he directed an action movie ‘Easy Money II: Hard to Kill’, the sequel to 2010 Easy Money.
The action movie ‘Olympus Has Fallen’ had an unlikely plot as is usual for action films. However, the film was directed persuasively by Antione Fuqua (Training Day, Tears of the Sun, Shooter) and had strong performances by Gerard Butler, Morgan Freeman, Aaron Eckhart, Angela Bassett and others.
With Butler, Eckhart, Bassett, and Freeman returning, the sequel plot will see characters heading to London to attend the funeral of a British Prime Minister. World leaders from far and wide are in attendance, but it turns out that it’s all a dastardly scheme to get them in one place for a mass assassination.
