Gerard Butler and director Ric Roman Waugh will return for Greenland: Migration, which will pick up several years after the first movie.

Director Ric Roman Waugh has offered some detailed insight into what his upcoming post-apocalyptic sequel, Greenland: Migration, will involve. In a lengthy interview with Collider, the filmmaker has revealed when the follow-up will pick up with survivor Gerard Butler and the rest of the Garrity family, as well as what exactly Greenland: Migration will all be about…

“It’ll be about who survived, and how did they rebuild the earth when everything was completely burned to the ground. So it’s a beautiful kind of way to give you a conclusion of the Garritys and where they go. So, do you call it a sequel? Yeah, but to me, it’s more of the final chapter of what this story has to say.”

Released back in December 2020, the first Greenland begins when scientists discover that fragments of a comet will hit Earth in a few days and will likely cause the extinction of humanity. The only hope of survival is to take shelter in a group of bunkers in Greenland, with the story following a family who must fight for survival as they make their way to salvation before the comet collides with the planet.

Greenland ends with a hint at the sequel, as the Garrity family leave the safety of the bunker to face the new world. And it sounds like the world has indeed gone through a lot of changes…

“And the fun of it is, the way that the extinction event happened during the dinosaur period and the continental divides changed, and where the tectonic plates went, we get to kind of F-up the world, so to speak, and create our own kind of utopia or dystopia, what we have now.”

Greenland: Migration Will Pick Up Years Later & Explore the Trauma of Being Trapped Underground

Ric Roman Waugh continues, revealing that Greenland: Migration will pick up several years after the first outing and finds engineer John Garrity (Gerard Butler) tackling the post-apocalypse now that the very worst is over.

“It’s 5 to 7 years later. It’s enough that, which was very true about the last extinction event, was that there was so much toxicity in the atmosphere that nobody could live above ground for quite a while. There was still fires and there’s all kinds of stuff going on, ash, you couldn’t breathe.”

As well as surviving out in the world, the Greenland sequel will explore what it’s like for humanity after being isolated underground for so long, and what such circumstances “do to the human psyche.”

“So we went by science and allowed a number of years to go by to where you realize that these people have been imprisoned underground. What does that do to the human psyche? How does that contribute to when you do go into a migration mode and you’re trying to find new places to survive and you have all of that trauma? A little boy that was eight years old, or seven years old, that’s now 13 or 14, what is his life as a teenager when he’s known nothing else but cement walls and underground? These are the things that we want to play with. So we feel like time underground, it’s factual of what happened, but also it helps us with story.”