When a studio buys the sequel to a movie before the first one even hits theatres, that’s generally a pretty good sign. In case you haven’t heard all the buzz surrounding Gareth Evans’ The Raid, the insane Indonesian action movie was a big hit at TIFF and Sundance, and now Sony is building even more hype by picking up the rights to its proposed follow-up, Berandal (“thug” in Indonesian), without even waiting to see how the first one will be received by the general public. They also already have an English-language remake in the works. The Raid star Iko Uwais will reteam with Evans for Berandal, which will supposedly have a bigger budget, although that’s not necessarily saying much (the original was shot for just $1 million).

The story is currently being kept under wraps, but in a recent interview with Collider, Evans explained how the idea for the sequel came about:

“I told you earlier about a film that we tried to get up off the ground and couldn’t get done. While I was developing The Raid, I was looking at ways to kind of link those two scripts together because we had done all this choreography on that first film, we were like ready to go we just needed the finance to pull the trigger on it. Because I didn’t want to just abandon that project, I started to look at ways we could link the two together. So the one problem I had with that original script was that the lead role didn’t have an interesting enough backstory… As I was thinking about it, I thought ‘Well if I make this a continuation of the story from The Raid, it’ll work much better, and it’ll kind of add more ideas and add more different elements to it,’ so it’s actually gonna be the sequel to The Raid.”

He also hinted that the movie would have some car chase elements, including “a cool fight scene where you go inside a car, fighting against four people as it’s speeding along a one-way.” Whoa. He says that these films will likely form the first two parts of a trilogy, with the third installment still a ways off. Either way, it sounds like he’s learning to build on the success of The Raid without having to sacrifice his creativity, which is a great way to go. I still have yet to see The Raid, but based on what I saw in his first film Merantau, I can only imagine how crazy it is. The Raid will hit select theatres on March 23rd… can it possibly live up to the hype?