A Third ‘Sicario’ Is Coming, With the Original Cast

Sicario did not look like franchise material. An ultra-dark, extremely violent thriller about the drug war? An ongoing film series? Apparently!

The first film had the benefit of a taut script by future Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan and superb direction from future Dune architect Denis Villeneuve. And it was a critical and commercial hit in 2015 So Lionsgate made a sequel, 2018’s Sicario: Day of the Soldado, written by Sheridan and directed by Stefano Sollima. Reviews for that one were a little weaker, but the sequel still made almost the exact same amount of money as the first film.

Now, per Deadline, Black Label Media and Thunder Road are preparing a third Sicario, which I hope will be called SicarThreeo. Padraic McKinley, who recently made the sharp period thriller The Weight will direct, from a screenplay by Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight.

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Perhaps most importantly, the entire core original cast of Sicario — Emily Blunt, Benicio del Toro, and Josh Brolin — is reportedly expected to return for the film. Blunt played a FBI agent who joins a secret task force led by Brolin and del Toro’s characters, charged with taking down Mexican drug cartels. But she wasn’t in the sequel, which focused on just del Toro and Brolin’s characters as they try to start a war between the cartels in order to weaken all of their operations.

The first movie was very much about Blunt character’s education in this shady, shadowy world, an arc you can’t really repeat in a sequel. Then again, perhaps a decade or so later, you could show just how this system transformed her values and morality, the same way it did to Brolin and del Toro. That’s an idea that could easily have some legs.

Deadline says that “McKinley and Knight are currently working on the script with notes from stars and the plan is to shoot at the top of year.”