Gerard Butler Dishes on Status of New ‘Has Fallen’ Movie

Gerard Butler‘s new action movie features a plane falling, even though it is not part of his Has Fallen franchise. A fourth film in the series has been written and has a “really fun” plot, Butler told ComicBook.com while promoting his latest film, Plane. The Has Fallen series launched in 2013 with Olympus Has Fallen and cemented Butler’s status as an action star.

The next Has Fallen movie is titled Night Has Fallen, and it has been in the works ever since Angel Has Fallen opened in August 2019. Angel director Ric Roman Waugh is attached and he wrote the script with Robert Mark Kamen. Butler told ComicBook.com he is not “working on it at the moment.”

“We have a really fun idea, it just needs to be to be developed,” Butler said. “But it’s been fun recently, making action. I will say – I want to play more the Tom Hanks of action movies. Let me take a break from the Mike Banning, where it’s literally seven or eight full-on fight sequences in every movie, fistfights. And actually claiming the characters that are real, who have to pull something extraordinary out of themselves that an audience can really identify with because that’s what we need right now.”

The franchise stars Butler as U.S. Secret Service Agent Mike Banning. In the first movie, Olympus Has Fallen, Banning had to rescue President Benjamin Asher (Aaron Eckhart) after Korean mercenaries capture the White House. In London Has Fallen (2016), Banning tries to protect Asher from terrorists when he visits the U.K. for the British Prime Minister’s funeral. In Angel, Bennett has to clear his name after the new president, Allan Trumbull (Morgan Freeman) is attacked by drones. The movies grossed over $500 million worldwide combined.

“We need, in a way, real heroes,” Butler told ComicBook.com. “Life is tough, it’s a bit of an escape and I think to go and see movies like this and put yourself in those kind of hellish challenging scenarios and then be able to walk back out again, but maybe take some ideas from, or just some inspiration from it and have had a lot of fun, is cool. It’s great to… make those movies that are an escape.”

Millennium Media, the company behind the Has Fallen movies, is interested in bringing the franchise to the small screen. The studio also produced the most recent Rambo movies and Sylvester Stallone’s Expendables films.

“Our focus has always been on feature film, we do have a slate of TV that we’re developing,” Millennium president Jeffrey Greenstein told The Hollywood Reporter in November 2021. “But my plan is to focus on our IP within the TV space and build out Has Fallen TV, Rambo TV, Expendables TV. We’re playing around with Hellboy TV. So there are lots of opportunities, but I really want to launch something IP-driven first before we start developing original content.”