At the Cannes International Film Festival, a showcase for celebrities and big-name “prestige” pictures, a sequel to a pulpy Liam Neeson movie called Ice Road just set a record.
Behind the famous red carpets, the festival is where moviemakers, both famous and not, try to sell their movies, both celebrated and not, to a distributor. Deadline reports Ice Road 2: Road to the Sky just sold for around $17 million to Amazon Prime Video.
The 2021 original, which had a brief run in theaters before taking off on Netflix, has Neeson playing Mike McCann, another guy with a particular set of skills — this one driving trucks on, well, icy roads. He later undertakes a rescue mission of a group of trapped miners whose accident may not have been an accident.
According to the trade, the sequel sees McCann trading in the tundras for Nepal, plying his skills as a tour bus driver on the treacherous mountain roads in the Asian country. There, he must save his passengers from a group of mercenaries.