The Title for the Edge of Tomorrow Sequel is One Cheeky Mouthful

The new title for the Edge of Tomorrow sequel has been revealed via Collider, and it’s one cheeky mouthful: Live Die Repeat and Repeat.

Fans of the original will recognize the first film’s tagline “Live. Die. Repeat” embedded in the follow-up’s title, except the doubling of “Repeat” seems to suggest something more clever than mere, well, repetition. A single use of “repeat” would’ve been sufficient to convey a premise that, if anything like the plot of the first film, will focus on a Groundhog Day-esque reliving of a single moment in time, with characters respawning at the start of the time loop like avatars in a videogame. The use of the second “repeat,” however, is so blatantly redundant that it calls attention to itself and, perhaps, evokes a larger phenomenon where an unnecessary recycling of the same, previous material is used simply to protract a narrative that would’ve benefited from brevity: blockbuster sequels.

A sequel that’s self-conscious about its status as a sequel is nothing new and has, in the past, been no guarantor of quality. Still, to have a film that takes a subtle approach to acknowledging sequel-dom is a refreshing departure from, say, the in-your-face faux edginess of a movie like Deadpool. Whether Live Die Repeat and Repeat will explicitly comment on Hollywood’s sequel obsession remains to be seen, but given Liman’s remarks about the film, chances are good that the formula of sequels—and its subsequent subversion—will be featured in and/or embodied by the film somehow. He told Collider:

I’ve had some radical ideas about how to make a sequel that would interest me, in the same way that I had ideas of how you make an independent film and then Swingers came along and it was like ‘Aha, that’s the perfect movie for me to test these ideas out on.’ I had these intellectual ideas on how you should make a sequel that are unlike how anybody else makes a sequel, and this script and this idea fit perfectly into that idea. So it’s gonna revolutionize how people make sequels. And again that’s why I try to do things like Invisible that are just, the revolution’s sort of built into the idea. It’s more heresy in the film world for me to pitch things that are sort of unheard of.

Stay tuned for more updates on the production of Live Die Repeat and Repeat and hope that the first film’s wit and giddy anarchy will be among the things that are repeated in the follow-up.