Though The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 is the YA adaptation on everyone’s lips this year, 20th Century Fox is also preparing to release Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials, the sequel to its 2014 hit The Maze Runner, which will serve as a test of the budding franchise’s box office legs.
Picking up directly after the conclusion of the first entry, Scorch Trials finds Thomas (Dylan O’Brien), joined by the rest of the Gladers he led through a deadly maze to apparent safety at great personal cost to them all, struggling to keep himself and his friends alive. As the trailer reveals, their apparent saviors on the other side of the Maze make Thomas uneasy, and he ends up deciding that the best way to protect the people he cares about is to lead them away from a possibly nefarious organization and into the harsh and desolate landscape known as The Scorch.
The new trailer is action-packed and intense, hinting at a much darker and scarier expansion of the post-apocalyptic world only touched upon in The Maze Runner. With director Wes Ball back at the helm and an expanded cast including Game of Thrones‘ Aidan Gillen, the chances for this follow-up to please fans of the original seem very good. Whether the sequel will draw in more fans is a different question entirely – Fox is heavily banking on audiences knowing all the characters and set-up going in.
Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Kaya Scodelario, Giancarlo Esposito, Ki Hong Lee, Rosa Salazar and Jacob Lofland star opposite O’Brien in Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials, which opens September 18.
In this next chapter of the epic “Maze Runner” saga, Thomas (Dylan O’Brien) and his fellow Gladers face their greatest challenge yet: searching for clues about the mysterious and powerful organization known as WCKD. Their journey takes them to the Scorch, a desolate landscape filled with unimaginable obstacles. Teaming up with resistance fighters, the Gladers take on WCKD’s vastly superior forces and uncover its shocking plans for them all.