Evan Rachel Wood Confirms Westworld Season 2 Coming Early-ish Next Year
The last time we heard or saw anything definitive about Westworld season 2, it was during Comic-Con this past July when HBO released a brief teaser (which has since been taken down). When it comes to production, the set of Westworld is as secretive as Game of Thrones or any of the major film franchises (Marvel, DC, Star Wars, etc.), so getting even a little bit of information is something.
It took a Westworld fan asking (almost begging) star Evan Rachel Wood when season 2 might begin for us to get our first bit of news in a while. Wood replied with this brief tweet:
Spring 2018 https://t.co/qM5VqCwoPA
— #EvanRachelWould (@evanrachelwood) November 6, 2017
Westworld’s thrilling season one finale, in which the “hosts” (read; extremely lifelike androids) revolted against their creators and seemed to take control of the park was way back in December of 2016. The gap between the finale and season 2’s premiere can be blamed, in part, on Game of Thrones and Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy. How so, you’re wondering? Westworld co-creator Jonathan Nolan (Christopher’s brother and a screenwriter on The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises) had this to say to The Hollywood Reporter after Westworld’s season 1 finale:
“Definitely not coming back until 2018. Look, we said to the network very early that this was a different kind of show, having gone through the experience of making the pilot. Game of Thrones is incredibly ambitious, and that was part of the reason we knew we wanted to make this show with HBO. Game of Thrones kind of has written the book on production value for television, and how to make something that has all the scope and scale of cinema for a TV show. They also have an advantage of having [George R.R. Martin’s] amazing books, or had it for the first six seasons, which gives you a leg up. I still don’t know how they turn those seasons around in a year. It’s astonishing. But we knew for ourselves that going forward, the production is enormously challenging and ambitious, and so is the writing. So we said very early on that we wouldn’t be able to turn this around every year, and knowing full well that that’s been a time-honored tradition in television. But in film, my other life, on the Batman movies, the best we could do is turn another one around in three years. I really feel like we’re splitting the difference here.”
For season 2, Nolan and his co-creator Lisa Joy told Entertainment Weekly this past March that fans shouldn’t expect things to simply pick up right at the robot revolution and carry on in a linear fashion (it’s not like season one was straight forward, either), but rather that it’ll explore the weirdness of the park that was primarily left out of season one, as that season was told largely through the hosts’ perspective, and the park was the only reality they had known.
“It didn’t feel appropriate to spend too much time illuminating how unreal this place is, because the hosts believe in it so much up until that horrifying moment when they realize that it’s an artificial world. So we didn’t get bogged down in it. [We] will spend a little bit more time next season shining a light on those aspects of the park — what does it feel like to come to it as a guest? — just a little bit before the mayhem starts.”
We’ll keep you posted on any Westworld news we hear, but our guess is things will be pretty quiet for a while, unless another insistent fan asks, say, Thandie Newton what’s in store for her revolutionary host Maeve. Any takers?
Featured image: Episode 10: Evan Rachel Wood. Photo: John P. Johnson/HBO
