Cliffhanger Director Renny Harlin Hopes Sequel Won’t Rely on CGI

Director Renny Harlin won’t be involved in the upcoming Cliffhanger reboot, but he does hope the film sticks to the use of practical effects when they make it.

Speaking to ComingSoon, Harlin was asked about the fact that the 1993 film is getting remade. Harlin revealed he had actually been trying to get another film made “for decades.” While he isn’t sure what is happening now, he does hope that there isn’t an over-reliance on CGI, however.

“To be honest, I’ve tried for decades. I always felt the movie was hugely successful, and it was crazy that there wasn’t a sequel. There was more story to tell,” said Harlin.

“Now, of course, it’s a long time later, so I have no idea what kind of a story they are planning to tell or what Sly’s role in it is. But I wish them the best of luck. I hope they don’t try to replace what we did with a lot of CG. Because I think the audience will be able to tell that we did everything for real. We shot at 12,000-foot peaks in the Italian Alps. It was real stuff, like the opening sequence with the girl falling. It was done for real. That was at 8,000 feet, that wire,” the director continued.

“It’s so easy for the studios to say now, ‘We’ll do everything blue screen and create everything digitally.’ I hope they don’t do that because it deserves a sequel with the same spirit of the original.”

What to Expect in the Cliffhanger Reboot?

The Cliffhanger reboot will be directed and executive produced by Ric Roman Waugh, and adapted from a screenplay written by Mark Bianculli. Waugh is best known for his directorial efforts in Gerard Butler-led action films Angel Has Fallen and Greenland.

“Growing up with the biggest action films of the ’80s and ’90s, working on many of them myself, Cliffhanger was by far one of my favorite spectacles,” Waugh said in a statement. “To be at the helm of the next chapter, scaling the Italian Alps with the legend himself, Sylvester Stallone, is a dream come true. It’s going to be a great challenge and blast taking this franchise to new heights, a responsibility I don’t take lightly.”

The original Cliffhanger was directed by Harlin from a script co-written by Stallone. It revolved around Stallone’s Walker, a mountain climber haunted by past mistakes. In the film, Walker gets involved in a high-stakes heist as a group of international thieves try to locate their missing loot after their plane crashes into the mountain.