The Big Picture
- Real Steel was a surprise hit in 2011, going beyond its robot boxing premise with heart, redemption, family, and a Cinderella story.
- Talks of a sequel began shortly after its release, but 12 years later, there is still no sequel.
- Shawn Levy, the director, has shifted focus to a Disney+ series and has received numerous offers from writers interested in the project.
Director Shawn Levy‘s Real Steel, whose main selling points were Hugh Jackman and big-ass robots beating the cogs out of one another, seemingly appeared out of nowhere. It was a huge hit that went beyond its Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robot premise (which the marketing of the film focused primarily on), as it proved to be a winning combination of heart, redemption, family, and Cinderella story. The effects—a seamless blend of practical and CGI—even earned the film an Oscar nomination for Best Visual Effects. Talks of a sequel began shortly after its release in 2011 and before we knew it, Real Steel 2 was put into development. Now, 12 years after the original was released, there is still no sequel. So, where is the sequel to this endearing robot story?
What Went Down in ‘Real Steel’?
The original film begins in the future, 2020, when human boxers have been replaced by robots. Charlie Kenton (Jackman), a former boxer himself, travels with his robot Ambush taking on competitors for prize money. The film opens at a carnival, where Charlie bets money on Ambush beating a bull. Bad call, as Ambush gets destroyed by the beast, prompting Charlie to flee. Soon after, Charlie learns his ex-girlfriend has died, and there is a hearing to decide the fate of Max (Dakota Goyo), their son. At the hearing, Max’s aunt and her husband seek full custody of Max, which Charlie will happily agree to for $100,000, with $50,000 paid in advance. They agree on the condition that Charlie keep Max with him for three months as they go away. Charlie takes Max to the gym owned by his old boxing coach’s daughter, Bailey (Evangeline Lilly), and uses the advance to buy Noisy Boy, a once-famed robot boxer. He and Max take Noisy Boy to an underground boxing arena, where Noisy Boy is defeated. Max, a robot-boxing and tech wunderkind, comes across a disheveled sparring robot Atom as he scavenges for parts. Max convinces Charlie to use Atom in his next fight, which Atom wins.
After a series of victories, Max challenges boxing champion Zeus to a fight. But after being jumped by the carnival owner and his henchmen, Charlie brings Max home, just as Charlie was learning to be a father. After talking with Bailey, Charlie reconciles with Max and brings him to the match he arranged with Zeus. Zeus is powerful, but Atom (barely) holds his own. When Atom’s voice recognition is damaged, Charlie flips on the robot’s “shadowing” feature, allowing Charlie to fight Zeus by proxy, nearly destroying the champion. The decision goes to Zeus, but Atom has endeared itself to a roaring crowd. The story was practically guaranteed to move forward with Atom and with the father/son team that believed in it and eventually, in themselves.
Should We Still Expect a ‘Real Steel 2’?
It was the perfect setup for a sequel, with Atom’s future in World Robot Boxing seemingly cemented. Plans for it popped up almost immediately, with director Levy speaking directly to DreamWorks Co-Chariman/CEO Stacey Snider on a regular basis in 2011. By 2014, there was still no sequel, although the director did say that it was still being developed. At the Toronto International Film Festival that year, Levy got a bit more specific as to where the sequel was at. “We have been quietly developing a sequel to Real Steel for three and a half years. We’ve come up with some great scripts but Hugh and I would only make it if the plot feels fresh, but also the character journeys feel fresh, and we’ve found both but never at the same time. It’s ongoing. I know the clock is ticking.” Then, radio silence. Nothing confirmed, nothing rumored, just nothing. The ongoing search for a script that met the criteria that he and Jackman were striving for was clearly elusive, assuming the hunt for it was still on at all.
Shawn Levy Has His Eyes on a Disney+ Series
Collider’s own Steve Weintraub got some exciting updates during an interview with Shawn Levy in February of 2022, when the director mentioned the love the fans still have for a film that’s over a decade old. “The day that story broke, we shifted into what we call the incoming call business, which is the business of you’re sitting back and your phone’s ringing and it’s just incoming calls. And it’s agents one after another saying, ‘My writer is dying to write it. Can you meet with my writer? My writer has an idea.’ So, it shifted the dynamic of the search for a writer and a take. And it just became a lot easier because suddenly the volunteers and the ideas were flowing our way.”
In December that year, Levy commented that the delay in any progress was largely due to his overprotectiveness of the film’s legacy, preferring to have no film at all as opposed to one that felt “wrong.” The prompting of the confession was the news that finally—finally—a follow-up to the 2011 film was actively in development. That follow-up, though, wouldn’t be the Real Steel 2 that had long, long been expected. It would instead be a Real Steel series on Disney+, which was “in very active and promising development.” What made the latest update promising was Levy’s confirmation that writers had actually been selected for the project, the furthest confirmed development since we last saw Atom, with Max upon his shoulder, taking in the adulation of the crowd in the final scenes of the original. Now with that said, the so-called “active and promising” development is still being defined as in the early stages, the stage it had supposedly been in for almost an entire year.
Alas, no bone would be thrown then for the fans to gnaw on in anticipation, nor have any bones been thrown since. It’s unclear whether or not Jackman will return, and depending on the timeline of the series, Max would have to be recast—assuming either character would be involved at all. Throwing a wrench into the proceedings was the 2021 announcement that actor Vin Diesel would star in and produce a live-action feature version of the tabletop boxing game Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots for Universal Studios/Mattel Films. While any news on the progress of that particular feature hasn’t exactly been freely rolling out, it has to feel, to at least some degree, that whoever gets out of the gate first wins the spoils. But as we learned from Real Steel, you can’t count an underdog out, and while Levy’s Atom may get beaten about by Diesel’s red-and-blue robot warriors, Atom certainly won’t go down without a fight.
