‘Violent Night 2’s Writer Shares a New Update on the Sequel

It’s only been a few weeks since David Habour posted photos on his personal Instagram with Santa Claus, sparking debate that he was perhaps ready to begin production on Violent Night 2, the sequel to the 2022 R-rated Christmas action flick. Now, the scriptwriters have delivered a more concrete update on the film, and while it does appear to be in active development, it’s perhaps not moving quite as fast as fans would want. It’s been over two years since the premiere of Violent Night, which earned strong reviews of 74% from critics and 88% from general audiences on Rotten Tomatoes while earning $76 million at the box office on a $20 million budget.

While speaking to Screen Rant to promote Sonic the Hedgehog 3, scribes Pat Casey and Josh Miller revealed how work on the film is going. Miller offered, “We’re closing in on trying to get a draft out, so we’re well underway. Mildly distracting to have Sonic 3 dropping at the same time as our deadline, but I guess champagne problems.” With Casey adding:

“Yeah, as soon as we get off this morning’s interviews, we’re right back into the Violent Night 2 salt mines, but I think it’s going to be a lot of fun. I wish we had a date to announce, but we don’t yet. But everybody really wants to get it going, so hopefully soon, we’ll have have more solid information. But it’s a little hard to schedule around David Harbour, currently, on account of he’s a busy man with certain other giant mega franchises that, unfortunately, seem to get scheduling priority over us, for some inexplicable reason.”

The fact that the writers are still working on getting a first draft in means it will likely be well into next year before the film can officially start filming unless the executives at Universal decide to give Violent Night 2 the green light to begin production before the script is complete, which usually doesn’t end well. At this stage, it seems unlikely that the Violent Night sequel will be ready to release in time for the next holiday season; it may ultimately be a four-year gap between Violent Night movies if the sequel doesn’t launch until 2026. In addition to David Harbour as Santa, Violent Night also stars John Leguizamo as Scrooge and Alexis Louder as Linda, and the film was directed by Tommy Wirkola.

What Else Does David Harbour Have Coming Up?

Harbour can currently be heard as the voice of Frankenstein in Creature Commandos and as the voice of Red Guardian in What If…?, and he’ll also reprise his role as Red Guardian next year in Marvel’s Thunderbolts*, which is due in theaters on May 2, 2025. He’ll also team up with Jason Statham next year for A Working Man, previously titled Levon’s Trade, the action thriller from David Ayer that also stars Michael Peña. He’s even been tapped for a role in The Trashers, the true crime thriller from Cooper Raiff and Adam R. Pearlman that also stars Olivia DeJonge and Cooper Hoffman.

Violent Night 2 does not have a release date, and it’s unknown when the film will begin production. Stay tuned to Collider for future updates and watch Violent Night on Starz.