Morgan Freeman Heads to TV for Spinoff of One of His Movies

Morgan Freeman is heading to TV for a spinoff series of one of his past action movies. Deadline reports that Lucy, a 2014 sci-fi action film starring Freeman and Scarlett Johansson, is getting a spinoff series. Freeman is in negotiations to return as Professor Samuel Norman but other details are being kept under wraps.

Lucy was written and directed by Luc Besson, and stars Johansson as Lucy Miller, a woman who develops psychokinetic skills after her bloodstream absorbs an illegal drug that she was forced to transport inside her abdomen. The film received many positive reviews from critics and was a mega-hit with fans. Lucy earned $463.4 million at the box office on a budget of $39 million. Besson had previously stated that he wasn't sure how the movie would merit a sequel. "With Lucy, you'll see the end of the film. I don't know how we can make a sequel, but if the film is huge, then I will think about it," he told a WonderCon crowd in 2014, per Collider.

Later, THR quoted Besson as saying, "I don't see how we can do one. It's not made for that. If I find something good enough, maybe I will, but for now I don't even think about it." In 2015 it was reported that a Lucy sequel was in development, and in 2017 it was reported that Besson had completed a script. However, the filmmaker subsequently took to social media to state that he was not working on a sequel to Lucy.

Back in 2014, ahead of the film's release, Besson spoke with Den of Geek about Lucy and shared where the idea for the film came from. "In fact 10 years ago I was promoting a film in a town and the mayor threw a dinner," he shared. "They put a girl next to me and I thought it was the niece of the mayor, who wanted to be an actress. And I said, 'What are you doing?' And she said, 'I'm a professor and I'm studying nuclear cells that get cancer.' So I was really not expecting at all to be next to a person like this."

He continued, "And then we started to talk for hours and I got very excited about what I learned. And then I started to read a couple of books and a couple of years later I met this professor who works on the brain. We became friends and I became a founder of an institute that does research about the brain. So I swam in this environment for a couple of years and I have this feeling that I needed to know more really about what's going on before we even start to write the script.

Besson added, "I started to write the script two, three years ago and I went very slowly. I guess I was not using 10 percent (of my brain) but probably less, so it took me a while. I didn't want to mess up the thing. The brain is very important. You can't joke around. But at the same time I wanted to do an entertaining film. I didn't want to do a documentary. So I tried to mix up the two to make a thriller with philosophical content. That was the idea: let's see if we can reach both at the same time in the same film." The Lucy spinoff does not yet have an announced TV or streaming home.