Trailer
What is Glass?
It's the third film in the series that began with dark comic-book drama Unbreakable and psychological horror-thriller Split. It's easy shorthand to call it the third film in a trilogy – and you'll hear and read that a lot. That's not technically correct, however, if you want to talk semantics. Rather, it's a sequel to two separate, quite different films that, while revealed late on to be taking place in the same world (and more specifically the same Philadelphia), weren't otherwise obviously connected. Glass is the joining of two other stories: it isn't the final third of a single story.
Who is starring in Glass?
Bruce Willis plays David Dunn
Bruce Willis reprises his role as Unbreakable's protagonist. Dunn was the Philadephia security guard who, in that earlier film, discovered he was invincible when he walked away from a train crash as the unscathed sole survivor. Sporting a hooded rain poncho, he began undertaking some low-key vigilante superheroics, encountering apparent wannabe mentor Elijah Price along his journey. In the final minutes of Split, Willis-as-Dunn made an uncredited cameo as a diner patron watching a TV news bulletin about Split's events.
Samuel L. Jackson plays Elijah Price, AKA Mr. Glass
Samuel L. Jackson's character, in one of those classic Shyamalan twists, turned out to be the villain of Unbreakable. Elijah Price presented himself to Dunn as his polar opposite, wheelchair-bound thanks to a condition that gave him incredibly brittle bones. Unbeknownst to either Dunn or the audience until the film's climax, Price had been engineering the events that prompted Dunn's superheroics: positioning himself as the cerebral mastermind supervillain to Dunn's physical superhero. He named himself Mr. Glass in reference to his physical fragility. It was originally a name that bullies called him, but he decided to own it.
James McAvoy plays Kevin Wendell Crumb, AKA The Horde
James McAvoy's character – or multiple characters – was the focus of Split. Kevin Wendell Crumb suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder, his mind host to 24 warring personalities, some of whom are lethal. Three of those split personalities, "Dennis", "Patricia" and "Hedwig", eventually stage a coup to release "The Beast", a further persona that gives Kevin superhuman abilities and murderous rage. The Beast's agenda is to rid the world of the "Untouched": people who have never known suffering. Those who have had a harder time, according to his philosophy, are the "Pure" who will inherit the Earth. Kevin is loose and hiding out at the end of Split, and nicknamed "The Horde" by the media. The news anchor that David Dunn is watching in Split's final scene draws a supervillainous comparison between The Horde and Mr. Glass.
Anya Taylor-Joy plays Casey Cooke
Anya Taylor-Joy's character survived being kidnapped by the Kevin horde in Split, and returns in Glass, presumably as an ally for Dunn. Casey Cooke was targeted by The Horde as a sacrifice for The Beast, but her history of trauma and self-harm paradoxically saved her. The Beast, seeing her scars, recognised her as one of his "Pure" and let her live.
Spencer Treat Clark plays Joseph Dunn
Spencer Treat Clark was 13 when he played Bruce Willis' son in Unbreakable. Now in his 30s and still acting (he recently had a five-episode run on Agents Of SHIELD, for example), he's able to revisit the role of the now grown-up kid who idolises his superhero dad.
Sarah Paulson plays Dr. Ellie Staple
New to the series, Sarah Paulson's character in Glass is described as a psychiatrist with a professional expertise in delusions of grandeur. She specialises in patients who think they're superhuman.
Charlayne Woodard plays Mrs Price
Charlayne Woodard played Elijah / Mr. Glass' mother in Unbreakable, and returns to Glass in the same role.
Who is directing Glass?
It's M. Night Shyamalan, who is also the screenwriter and a producer. Shyamalan always wears all the hats, and will almost certainly make a cameo appearance on-screen too. His previous films other than Unbreakable and Split include The Sixth Sense, Signs, The Village, After Earth and The Visit.
Shyamalan has been talking up a possible sequel to Unbreakable for more than a decade. In 2009, for example, he told MTV that he'd love to make one, but was just "waiting for a story to pop into my head". It took a while, but it turned out that the way forward was always in an original, abandoned draft of Unbreakable. The mutiple-personalitied character of Kevin in Split was the original antagonist in Unbreakable, until Shyamalan took him out and shifted the focus to Mr Glass instead. When he decided to dust Kevin off for Split, he realised the opportunity to also revisit Unbreakable was right in front of him.
"Bruce [Willis] and Sam [Jackson] have been asking me to consider doing another one for so long," Shyamalan told us last year. "I said I'd think about it, but you have to start from something you’re inspired by, or an idea. Even a storytelling tone. It can’t be inorganic, saying I want to do it because it’ll be successful. I was overly resistant to it, so when I called Bruce for this one, I said, ‘This is what I did. I took the character I wrote that was supposed to be in Unbreakable and I’ve made it as a movie, and I’d love to have you in it at the end.’ He said, 'I’m in!' He did it as a favour."
What is Glass' story?
Predictably for the secretive Shyamalan, details are tightly under wraps. The only synopsis we have so far is one that you could pretty much have inferred anyway: "Glass finds David Dunn pursuing Kevin Wendell Crumb's superhuman figure of The Beast, in a series of escalating encounters. Meanwhile the shadowy presence of Elijah Price, aka Mr. Glass, emerges as an orchestrator who holds secrets critical to both men."
Where is Glass being filmed?
In a word, Philly! Production started in Philadelphia in October, 2017. Some location shooting is known to have taken place at the Ontario Street Comic Book Shop, which is the same premises used for Elijah Price's Unbreakable comic shop in 2000. There was also some filming at the Allentown State Hospital, Pennsylvania. That would appear to be playing the part of the Psychiatric Hospital where Paulson's Ellie Staple works.
Who is composing Glass' score?
It's West Dylan Thordson, working with Shyamalan for the second time following Split. He also composed the scores for Foxcatcher and Joy.
When is Glass released?
Glass is currently in post-production and on schedule for a worldwide release on January 18, 2019. As a side-note, the fact that Unbreakable was a Disney film and Split a Universal film has seemingly caused no problems whatever; the two studios have happily collaborated to make Glass possible, with Jason Blum's Blumhouse company as an intermediary. Universal will handle Glass' release in the US, with Disney organising the rest of the world.
Will Glass have a surprise twist ending?
It's an M. Night Shyamalan film. Of course it will.
Poster
Shyamalan revealed the first Glass poster via his Twitter account in June, 2018.
