In Jon Turteltaub’s The Meg, Jason Statham’s Jonas went head-to-head against a giant megalodon in China. The movie adapted the 1997 book, Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror by Steve Alten, with Jonas partnering with an oceanographer, Suyin (Li Bingbing), to eventually defeat the behemoth. However, while it felt like a one-and-done story, a sequel was announced because the movie did well at the box office. So, with filming finally underway with new director Ben Wheatley, let’s dissect how the last movie ended, and if this sequel, given the source material, will focus on another shark coming to the surface.
How Did The Meg End?
The 2018 film saw Jonas, a U.S. Navy diver, piloting a submersible that acted as a mini-war ship alongside Suyin, who was hoping to redeem her family legacy after a project brought the meg through a crack in the Mariana Trench and into open water. And she succeeded in a thrilling finale which saw Suyin shot missiles at the meg, buying time for Jonas to use the dorsal fin atop his vessel like a blade.
Jonas dragged it along the underside of the meg, cutting its belly open from its mouth to the tail, and used a poisoned spear to dig its eye up and weaken it, carving an opening for other smaller sharks to attack in a feeding frenzy. And after the smaller sharks devoured the alpha, Jonas and Suyin basked in the victory because they knew they had avoided catastrophe.
Will The Meg 2 Feature the Megalodon?
The second film, The Meg 2: The Trench, will be based on the 1999 novel The Trench, but the status of the beast remains a mystery. The book focused on the last meg, Angel, having escaped the Trench as well, growing from a pup into a giant. It would bust out of captivity years later, going on to clash with the real villain that came through the Trench: the kronosaurus.
The sequel could follow a similar path because, in The Meg, another meg came up earlier in the film and was killed via lethal injection. This is why the second, bigger one came for revenge in the finale against Jonas. And since the first two came through the crack due to a temperature shift, it’s possible other pups snuck out in secret in the first film, growing in size in the time between the first and second movies.
Whether it’s one king shark or many, having the meg return is plausible, and it would be an easy way to add the kronosaurus to the story. This could pave the way for the rivalry from the books, with Jonas getting caught in the middle of a monster war similar to Godzilla and Kong. The megalodon may not have the star power of those two kaiju, but its return could make for another fun adventure.
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