Jason Statham’s $927.5M Action-Packed Shark Franchise Gets Disappointing Sequel Update 3 Years Later

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The Meg franchise might be dead in the water.

The action movies starring Jason Statham, where he plays Jonas battling massive, ancient sharks, began in 2018 with an adaptation of Steve Alten’s 1997 novel, Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror. The first film, directed by Jon Turteltaub, was a huge success, earning $529 million on a budget of around $175 million. The 2023 sequel, The Trench, directed by Ben Wheatley, made $398.5 million with a budget of about $140 million, bringing the total earnings for the series to almost $1 billion. However, a third Meg movie hasn’t been officially approved yet.

Ben Wheatley recently spoke with The Direct while at SXSW promoting his new film, Normal. The conversation touched on his previous comments about a possible sequel to The Meg. While he acknowledged the creature itself is still a threat – saying, “The Meg itself, it’s out there swimming” – he stated he doesn’t know if a third movie is actually happening. He simply said, “I don’t know what’s going on [with a third movie].”

He did offer a funny concept for The Meg 3: the idea of scientists studying the Meg for the military, and somehow, it evolves legs and walks onto land.

With the first two Meg movies directed by different people, it’s possible a third film is being planned without director Jon Turteltaub. However, producers might be delaying development of The Meg 3 because the series isn’t performing as well at the box office as it used to.

Despite some negative reactions, Meg 2: The Trench was actually quite successful financially. To break even, it needed to earn around $350 million worldwide, and it exceeded that, bringing in $400 million. This made it the 19th highest-grossing film of 2023, performing better than popular movies like Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, Five Nights at Freddy’s, Creed III, and even Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour.

If The Meg 3 costs about the same as the previous film and performs similarly poorly, it might only earn $300 million, which wouldn’t be enough to cover its costs. While making the movie cheaper could prevent this, it would be very difficult to significantly reduce the budget, considering how expensive it is to create a realistic prehistoric shark for the Jason Statham sequel.

As a big fan of these shark movies, I’ve been thinking about what the studio might do next with The Meg. It sounds like they’re considering spacing out the sequels a bit – maybe waiting three or more years – to really build up hype for a third film. They probably don’t want it to underperform like the second one did, so a longer wait could be their strategy to get people excited again.

There’s a possibility people are waiting to see if the first two The Meg movies become popular again. This could happen if the original film becomes available on a streaming service, as Meg 2 is currently on HBO Max but the first movie isn’t available for streaming anywhere right now.

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2026-03-28 16:50