Shyamalan Provides Glass Writing Update

Warning: The following contains SPOILERS for the movie Split.

M. Night Shyamalan is making nice progress on his film Glass, judging by the writer/director's latest update concerning the project. Shyamalan has experienced a lot of ups and downs during the course of his career, and these days things are definitely in the "up" position for him after the unexpectedly positive critical and public reception for his film Split. Expectations were low for Split when it first came out, but thanks in large part to Shyamalan's skillfully crafted, twisty narrative, the low-budget movie has taken in $276 million worldwide - and for the first time in years, there is genuine buzz about Shyamalan's next film.

Shymalan himself stoked that buzz by ending Split with a scene that connects the movie to his own earlier film Unbreakable, and the writer/director has since confirmed that he's going to continue telling the story that he began with those two films. The third movie in the series will be titled Glass, as mentioned, and Shyamalan has been hard at work writing it over the last few months.

Shyamalan has been trying to keep the buzz alive for Glass by providing updates about his very swift writing process, via his Twitter account. In his latest dispatch, Shyamalan indicated that he's already done two drafts for the script and is about to begin the third:

Finished the 2nd draft of #Glass on Friday. Took 5 weeks. Started the 3rd pass today... gave myself a 3 week deadline for this pass.— M. Night Shyamalan (@MNightShyamalan) May 28, 2017

Shortly after Split hit theaters with a remarkably strong $40 million opening weekend, Shyamalan indicated that he already had an outline for a Split sequel; one that will continue the stories of Split and Unbreakable, while still being able to stand alone as its own movie. In early March, Shyamalan revealed that he was working on a first draft, and clearly he's been very busy over the last couple months, as he's already progressed to the third pass.

Shyamalan provided a hint about the story for Glass in an interview he gave to Josh Horowitz's HappySadConfused podcast:

“All I can say is this: If Unbreakable was about a guy who is the only person who survives a train wreck, everyone dies and he doesn’t have a scratch on him. How is that possible? That’s a high concept, really cool story. And then this one is three girls get abducted by a person that has this disorder that he believes he’s many people, and all of the different personalities are saying there’s another personality coming to get them, it’s called The Beast. That in and of itself is a really cool thing. This third movie needs to have its own idea. The high concept of that final movie can’t be, ‘It’s the final Unbreakable.’ There has to be something about that that makes it its own movie… That’s when I’ll be happiest, is when it’s its own movie. In a way it could be watched by itself.”

Split tells the story of a man with multiple personalities (James McAvoy) who kidnaps and imprisons three young girls, including an introverted misfit played by Anya Taylor-Joy. As the story unfolds, not only does it become a tale of survival for the girls, it also becomes an exploration of the kidnapper's strange disorder, which ultimately is revealed to be much weirder than just a simple case of multiple personalities. The movie is tied directly back to Unbreakable in a brief scene that shows that film's star Bruce Willis back in character as David, the indestructible man. Willis will be back for Glass, as will Samuel L. Jackson as the original film's brittle-boned villain Elijah, along with Split stars McAvoy and Taylor-Joy. The film will reportedly have a bigger budget than Split, which was made for the relatively minuscule sum of $10 million.