The Invisible Man Director Shoots Down Hopes of a Sequel Return

The Invisible Man (2020) may have gotten lost in the onslaught of the pandemic and the closing of movie theaters worldwide, but it continues to earn acclaim as a modern cult hit. Now conversation about the film is picking up again, thanks to writer/director Leigh Whannell promoting his next film in the rebooted Universal Monsters series, Wolf Man (2025). There are already hints that Wolf Man is set in the same universe as Invisible Man, so fans are eager to know if we could also see a sequel to the latter film.

When ComicBook recently caught up with Leigh Whannell, the question of an Invisible Man sequel was addressed. Unfortunately for fans, Whannell doesn’t seem to have any creative motivation to follow up the first film:

“With Invisible Man, I really felt good about where we ended, for me,” Whannell said during New York Comic-Con. The filmmaker did admit that “I don’t own the IP for Invisible Man so Universal can make a sequel if they want to – but for me, as a filmmaker, I really think that was a closed story. I can’t see that there’s any more story to tell.”

The 2020 Invisible Man played on the original story about a man turned invisible through scientific means, and the moral quandaries faced by being able to act undetected. The remake came on the heels of the “Me Too” Movement with a story about a talented architect named Cecilia (Elisabeth Moss) who is in a toxic and abusive relationship with a tech mogul named Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen). When Cecilia leaves Adrian he fakes a suicide and uses his cutting-edge stealth suit to stalk and terrorize her. Whannell earned acclaim for the creative visual use of invisibility as a horror-thriller mechanism, while the cast earned praise for selling the underlying tension, drama, and real-life horror of domestic abuse.

Obviously, a lot of Invisible Man’s power and resonance as a film is directly connected to the specific story it tells. Any sequel would either turn the continuing story of those characters into something farcical (Adrian’s back from the dead! Cecilia is stalked by a new Invisible person – but who???); any sequel that jumps to new characters and only has the stealth suit as the connecting thread would be a hollow franchise studio cash-grab – as Whannell sort of indicates in his answer.

There’s also little reason for Whannell or Universal to be looking back. As stated, Wolf Man will kick off the 2025 movie year and is already building buzz for how it too is taking the story of a married couple and their child and making the wolf man monster serve as metaphors for domestic tensions, digital life vs. primal savagery, etc. Whannell and close collaborators like James Wan (Creature From the Black Lagoon) are rebuilding the entire Universal Monsters brand for modern times, with plenty of new projects to keep them busy before any sequels need to be made.

The Invisible Man is available on streaming. Wolf Man (2025) has a release date of January 17, 2025.

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