Among the most popular suggestions for ending M. Night Shyamalan’s recent career slump (second only to “Just stop”) is that the director craft a sequel to 2000’s Unbreakable, finally setting up the battle royale between Bruce Willis’ reluctant superhero and Samuel L. Jackson’s supervillain that the original film left dangling. Although Unbreakable was a rather modest performer at the box office and only mildly tolerated by critics—an era Shyamalan probably looks back on rather fondly now—it’s since accrued something of a cult following, if only because of the movie that it could have been. That’s a sentiment shared by Willis, anyway, who as recently as this past February hinted that he had talked to Shyamalan about “doing the fight movie between me and Sam that we were going to do,” and finally making good on the promise of the first film's origin story.
Unfortunately, it looks like that’s not going to happen—at least not anytime soon. Showing his usual acumen for giving the public exactly what he wants, Shyamalan recently told MTV that he had “cannibalized the idea” for the Unbreakable sequel for the next entry in his Night Chronicles series, which kicks off Sept. 17 with his Lucifer-in-an-elevator thriller Devil. Here’s the interview, during which he explains, “It was such a cool idea for a villain, and it was actually originally in the script for Unbreakable, and it was too much. There were too many villains, so I pulled this villain out and was like, 'I'll make this the second flick.'” Except then he didn’t. It’s a twist!