Bird Box is a massive hit for Netflix on a scale it hasn’t seen before with its original films. Netflix claims that 45 million accounts watched at least 70% of Bird Box, the threshold it uses to count “views,” and while that’s a typically cryptic Netflix stat (we don’t know how many viewers that actually translates to), it’s a huge figure regardless of the finer details.
Netflix does not often make sequels to their original films. The only one I can even think of offhand is The Christmas Prince 2, though I’m sure there are a couple more. But with Bird Box? A sequel seems inevitable.
The budget for Bird Box was reportedly only $19.8 million, as opposed to the previous Netflix original movie viewing record holder, Bright, which gave Will Smith and co. $90 million to play around with in that weirdo fantasy world. This is also just…what happens with successful horror films. Nearly any low budget horror film that ends up being a hit usually spawns a number of sequels, sometimes a huge number, barring isolated exceptions like The Sixth Sense. But pick any other horror franchise and you can probably list of anywhere from one to a dozen sequels for it, from Halloween to Saw to The Conjuring and more. Bird Box 2 seems like it will absolutely happen.
Clearly, it would require the reteaming of star Sandra Bullock, who bears a huge portion of the responsibility as to why Bird Box was such a hit, and director Susanne Bier, who made a solid feature that most people seem to be enjoying, be it as an actually scary horror film or a series of newfound internet memes.
So, what would a Bird Box 2 consist of? We have to kind of extrapolate from this genre, and that requires spoiling the ending of Bird Box, as presumably a sequel would pick up where the movie left off.
One of the best parts of Bird Box was that it actually had a happy ending, rare for the horror and/or post-apocalyptic genre, in which Sandra Bullock and her children find a sanctuary that has survived in part because it’s a former school for the blind, and that group would be more well-equipped to take on the newly sightless world that now exists around them. So where do things go from here? A few predictions:
- Even if the school seems like a sanctuary, the logistics of actually staying there are troubling. If we’ve learned anything from The Walking Dead, safe havens don’t stay safe for all that long. In this case, with so many people there it seems like they could definitely run out of food eventually, even if they are trying to farm, and that might drive the group out to seek new supplies.
- There are also a number of roving gangs of crazy, demon-possessed people out there, meaning that there could easily be some sort of siege on the school that scatters the group. I could envision some sort of situation in which Sandra Bullock’s children are kidnapped for some sort of ritual, and she spends the film trying to find them, perhaps with some of the blind people or other survivors from the school.
- One of the reasons Bird Box works is because it doesn’t dive too deep into the nature of the threat, and a sequel would have to be careful with how much information it wants to provide. Usually horror movies dive into the history of its spooky creations to discover their origins, but I don’t know if that’s the most important question to be answered here.
- If anything is going to be answered, I’d want to know what the goal of the demons is. As in, do they really just want to wipe out/possess the entire world, or if there’s some master plan in motion.
- I still don’t think we should actually see the demons. Supposedly there was a debate when Bird Box was being made over whether or not to show the monsters, and it was the right call not to. The problem is that it’s hard to imagine the demons showing up and being anything other than a letdown, given that their very image is supposed to drive you insane. We could see something like say, Sandra Bullock’s dead sister reappear, as that happens to some of the possessed, but I don’t think an actual monster reveal is necessary in a sequel, and continuing to hold that back would make Bird Box stand out from others in the genre.
Past all that, I don’t know. If it was up to me, I probably wouldn’t give Bird Box a sequel, as it has a solid arc and satisfying ending that really does not seem like it needs any follow-up. But again, this is a cheap, monster hit for Netflix, and it’s hard to believe that a sequel is not in the cards, even if it takes a year or two to get here.
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