Well, here’s a surprise.
Legendary producer Jerry Bruckheimer was on The Rich Eisen Show this week and casually dropped a bombshell: a “Crimson Tide” sequel is quietly in the works. Yes, that “Crimson Tide.” One of the best studio thrillers of the 1990s, and arguably one of the finest submarine movies ever made, may finally be surfacing for a second dive.
Bruckheimer confirmed that a writer-director is currently developing the project and actively working with the U.S. Navy to ensure authenticity. “We have a very good director-writer talking to the Navy right now about what’s going on in the water,” he told Eisen. “We have Denzel. If we give him a good script, I think he’d do it.”
That’s about as close to a confirmation as you’ll get in Hollywood these days.
For those who somehow haven’t seen it, Tony Scott’s 1995 “Crimson Tide” is a high-stakes, claustrophobic thriller centered around a mutiny aboard a U.S. nuclear submarine. The film famously pitted Denzel Washington’s by-the-book XO against Gene Hackman’s old-school, firebrand captain — a two-hander masterclass in tension, originally written by Robert Towne, with uncredited polish by Quentin Tarantino, and featuring a Hans Zimmer score.
No word yet on who the writer-director is, Bruckheimer kept that close to the vest, but if they’re already deep in Navy consultations, this thing is farther along than anyone ever realized.
The obvious guess would be Joseph Kosinski, but he’s already juggling multiple projects, so that seems unlikely. Christopher McQuarrie? Hard to say. Who would you want to direct this thing?
While James L. Brooks teased last year that "we'll soon be seeing" Jack Nicholson, 89, act again, and that he was "reading scripts," that idea has now been shut down by his close friend Michael Douglas, 82.