Patrick Lussier’s 2011 film Drive Angry might belong to a genre referred to here as “neo-grindhouse.” The late 2000s and early 2010s saw a wave of films that sought to evoke the style or content of a very specific type of exploitation film popular in the 1970s. Along with the 2007 Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez double feature Grindhouse and its spinoffs (“Machete,” “Thanksgiving,” “Hobo with a Shotgun”), films like Redline, The Man with the Iron Fists, Turbo Kid, Kung Fury, Hatchet, Torque, Deathgasm, House of the Devil, and The Love Witch appeared regularly.

Drive Angry embraced its silly action/horror premise with aplomb. A dead race car driver named (sigh) John Milton (Nicolas Cage) escapes the clutches of Hell by stealing Satan’s personal weapon, a device called the Godkiller. Hot on his heels is Satan’s accountant (William Fichtner), who is sent to nab John and drag him back to Hell. John, however, is determined to evade capture just long enough to save his granddaughter before a murderous cult leader (Billy Burke) can ritually sacrifice her on a Satanic altar.

Along the way, John saves a young woman named Piper (Amber Heard) from her abusive boyfriend and steals the boyfriend’s Dodge Charger. John and Piper spend much of the film in that car, plotting how to save his granddaughter.

Drive Angry is a huge piece of rubbish and was not particularly well received by critics or audiences, grossing only $41 million against a $50 million budget. Unfortunately, that meant that a planned sequel would never go into production. That’s a shame, because Lussier’s plans, recently mentioned in SyFy Wire, sounded really fun. John Milton would return to avenge the murder of Satan (!).

At the end of “Drive Angry,” the day is saved (not really a spoiler) and John Milton agrees to return to Hell with the Accountant. According to Lussier, in his sequel, the former enemies would have become a badass, hell-fueled revenge duo, taking to the streets armed with the Godkiller and taking good, old-fashioned, supernatural vendetta against a gang of demonic villains. It seems that Satan would have made a brief appearance in the second “Drive Angry”… only to be killed. In Lussier’s vision, Satan is something of a prison guard. Without a prison guard, all hell would literally break loose. Lussier said:

“The accountant and the bureaucracy are trying to prevent the walls of hell from completely collapsing because now everyone can get out. (…) The warden is no longer there. So we always thought of it as a big prison riot and how do you control that and the guys who started the riot? If you don’t bring them back and make an example of them, everyone will get out. (…) I want to see that movie! (…) We would make it into an animated film. I don’t care what the hell!”

Drive Angry, unfortunately, doesn’t have a huge pop culture presence in 2024, and it would be unlikely that a studio would put money into an unbankable intellectual property. Drive Angry was also shot in 3D, during the brief period after Avatar when filmmakers forced a 3D comeback. No one likes to remember that era.

The most selling aspect of Drive Angry 2 is the presence of Nicolas Cage, who is still popular and well-liked; Longlegs, currently in theaters, is a minor hit. If an animation studio is interested, let them know that Lussier is interested, too.