Greenland 2: How Children of Men inspired Gerard Butler's new post-apocalyptic thriller

'This comet could be a pandemic. It could be anything. It's really about how human beings are toward one another,' says the director of Greenland 2.

After all, how can you follow a movie about the literal end of the world? Most filmmakers might see the apocalypse as an obstacle to write around or retcon, but Waugh was determined to honor the plot of Greenland, in which engineer John Garrity (Gerard Butler) races across America to save his family from an Earth-ending meteor by bringing them to a military bunker on the eponymous Denmark-owned island.

“We didn't bullshit you,” Waugh says. “In most movies, they stop the comet and nobody gets hurt. We destroyed the Earth. It happened. And so we wanted to be unflinching with the second movie.”

So what changed? For one thing, Greenland became an unexpected hit. It was released in Dec. 2020, smack dab in the middle of COVID pandemic, so a planned theatrical release instead became a muted VOD dump.

“You shoot this movie, then COVID hits, and you're going, ‘Oh my God, now I have a disaster movie in the middle of a real disaster,’” Waugh recalls.

The timing ended up working out in the film’s favor, though. When Greenland hit HBO Max in 2021, it became a sleeper success. Audiences embraced the movie, while Waugh and screenwriter Chris Sparling started thinking about how they could possibly make a sequel.

The solution they came up with was to go straight through the apocalypse and imagine what would come next. Greenland 2: Migration is a post-apocalyptic thriller in which Garrity takes his wife Allison (Morena Baccarin) and son Nathan (recast as Roman Griffin Davis) on yet another epic journey in search of a new home after their bunker becomes inhospitable. Along the way, they discover a world changed dramatically by the meteor: flooded cities, unpredictable weather, and the collapse of society and the protections that come with it.

Greenland 2: Migration sometimes feels like The Last of Us without zombies: The real enemy here is any other human Garrity and his family meet along the side of the road. But Waugh compares it to another post-apocalyptic classic.

“I love Children of Men,” he says. “You're dealing with a real dystopian world, but it’s about the people within it and what human beings are capable of — what we do to one another. That's my favorite thing about this franchise. It has no bearing on what the disaster is. This comet could be a pandemic. It could be anything. It's really about how human beings are toward one another.”

That sounds bleak, but Greenland: Migration also has plenty of optimism baked into its story. Along their journey, the Garrity clan meet plenty of friendly faces desperate to help in any way they can — along with lots of desperate people eager to kill the family and steal what little they have left. Ultimately, Waugh isn’t trying to pass judgement either way. We all just went through a real-life apocalyptic event in COVID-19, and the director’s hope here is to simply give the audience something to think about after the movie ends.

“There were a lot of moral questions I wanted to entertain,” Waugh says. “My job as a filmmaker is not to answer these questions. It’s just to show situations, warts and all, and let us have a conversation about them.”

---

Greenland 2: Migration releases in theaters on Jan. 9.