The first big superhero movie of 2019 is mere days away: Glass, the sequel to 2000’s Unbreakable and 2016’s Split, is coming on January 17. There have been several trailers and TV spots, but in grand M. Night Shyamalan fashion, the film’s biggest mysteries remain intact.
Well, most of them.
In an interview with Fandango, Shyamalan revealed the following piece of information:
I don’t want to give too much away but you do see moments of the original Unbreakable…scenes you didn’t get to see.
The writer-director made this statement when talking about Joseph — the son of David Dunn (Bruce Willis) — who’s played and Glass by Spencer Treat Clark. That bit of information, along with Shyamalan citing the film Boyhood as another example of showing a character played by the same actors years apart, makes it seem like the old footage will have to do with that father-son relationship. Maybe we’ll see a bit more of the breakfast when David revealed to Joseph who he really was at the end of Unbreakable, but that’s just speculation.
In the same interview, Shyamalan said the film takes place about 15 years after Unbreakable (which came out 19 years ago) and a few weeks after Split. So that explains why James McAvoy and his Split co-stars (like Anya Taylor-Joy) look basically the same, while Samuel L. Jackson, Bruce Willis, and the other Unbreakable stars (which includes Clark as well as Charlayne Woodard as Mr. Glass’s mum) have aged significantly.
We’ve contacted Universal to try and get more information on this revelation and will update the article if that happens—and we’ll have a lot more on Glass in the coming weeks. (To that end, tickets are now on sale ahead of the film’s opening—and there are special trilogy screenings scheduled at several theatres. Read about those here.)