The first image is a man with his back to the camera, standing on a hillside at dusk beside a battered muscle car while a column of smoke rolls up out of the hills behind him. Then his hand comes to rest on the car’s steel grille guard, a bee crawls onto one of his fingers, and the sequel has announced itself before anyone says a word. Amazon MGM Studios released the first teaser for “The Beekeeper 2” on Thursday, October 15th, and the film, which brings back Adam Clay (Jason Statham), the quiet beekeeper who turned out to be something far more dangerous, opens only in theaters on January 15th, 2027. The big change is behind the camera, where the Indonesian action director Timo Tjahjanto, the filmmaker behind “The Night Comes for Us,” “The Shadow Strays” and “Nobody 2,” takes over from David Ayer, who directed the 2024 original.
The teaser runs a little over a minute, and it closes on an R rating, which is no surprise for a series whose first film sent its hero after the President’s own son. The first film reached theaters on January 12th, 2024, took $16.6 million in its domestic opening weekend and finished with more than $160 million worldwide against a reported $40 million budget. The sequel is aiming for nearly the same mid-January slot that worked three years ago. Returning alongside Statham are Wallace Westwyld (Jeremy Irons), FBI agent Verona Parker (Emmy Raver-Lampman), her partner Matt Wiley (Bobby Naderi) and President Jessica Danforth (Jemma Redgrave), while Pom Klementieff, Adam Copeland and Yara Shahidi join the cast in roles the studio has not described. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “The Beekeeper” and for the footage in the teaser for “The Beekeeper 2.”
Then his hand comes to rest on the car’s steel grille guard, a bee crawls onto one of his fingers, and the sequel has announced itself before anyone says a word.”
For anyone who skipped the first one, Clay kept hives in a barn he rented from a retired teacher, Eloise Parker (Phylicia Rashad), until a phishing scam drained her savings and the charity she ran, and she took her own life. His revenge climbed the chain all the way to Derek Danforth (Josh Hutcherson), a tech executive who happened to be the President’s son. Along the way it revealed Clay as a former Beekeeper, a member of a secret program that works outside the normal chain of government command. The sequel turns that program into the enemy. The official synopsis reads, “Pulled back into the fight when the Beekeeper organization goes rogue and sets its sights on controlling the government, Clay must take on the very group that made him.” A longer logline, carried by several outlets, adds that Clay becomes a wanted man because he has to protect President Danforth from the Beekeepers themselves, which flips the first film neatly, since his revenge there ran straight to her own son.
The opening stretch plays like a briefing. Over a dusk close-up of Clay, his face cut and bloodied, the bee lifts off his hand and drifts away as a voice tells him, “You were the most dangerous operative they’ve ever created.” He looks up, straight into the lens, while the voice goes on, “But now, the Beekeepers have gone rogue and you’re the only one who can stop them.” After the MGM and Miramax logos, the camera looks down on a bee emblem set into a floor ringed with small lights. Then it finds a blonde woman in a suit and tie standing between two tall lamps in a red-curtained chamber, holding a candle in each hand. The line “The Beekeepers want complete control of the government” plays over Washington at night, with the Washington Monument and the Capitol dome lit up. The sentence finishes on Irons himself, facing Clay in a stretch of gray, damp parkland: “and they’re prepared to kill anyone that gets in the way.”
That blonde woman is Klementieff, and she gets a close-up of her own a moment later, in a green-walled corridor, touching her cheek and then lifting an open hand, before the cut catches her firing a pistol at point-blank range in a narrow hallway. Nothing in the teaser says which side she is on, and the studio has not named her character, so whether she is a rogue Beekeeper or something stranger is still an open question. Back in the park, Clay, now in a maroon track jacket, leans in close and says, “If we’re gonna go up against the Beekeepers, we’re gonna do it my way.” Irons, playing it bone dry, answers, “I would hope for nothing less.” It is an odd alliance on paper, because Westwyld spent the first film on the other side, as the former CIA director running security for Danforth Enterprises, and the teaser plays the new partnership with a completely straight face.
Then the toy arrives. A black muscle car with a steel grille guard comes down a country road as Irons tells Clay, “I got you a car.” The caption names it, “1969 Dodge Super Bee,” over a shot of it skidding across wet pavement, and a close-up of the cartoon bee on its grille badge follows. On a stretch of concrete beside an earth embankment, men in tactical gear raise their rifles and close in, and with Clay at the wheel the line “Fully loaded with stinger” plays. He yanks a lever, a rotary machine gun swings up out of the passenger seat, and Clay fires it out through the passenger side while rounds punch holes in the door. The rest of the sequence is fire and metal. There is an overhead shot of the Super Bee spinning across the concrete past fallen men, a helmeted gunman hit in a spray of blood, and the car tearing past a fireball before the screen washes out to white. Polygon and The Playlist both identify the song under all of this as Metallica’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls.”
After the title card, Clay walks into a low concrete tunnel lined with pipes. A man in a combat helmet and an armored vest grins at him as the greeting “Welcome back, Clay” plays, then opens up with a flamethrower that fills the tunnel with fire. Clay ducks the blast, closes the distance, gets his hands on the weapon and jams its nozzle into the man’s mouth before he pulls the trigger. In the last shot he stands in the smoke, lit orange from below, and says, “Next time, don’t be so hotheaded.” A final card promises the film “Only in Theaters January 15” in premium formats. It is a teaser built almost entirely out of setups and punchlines. The punchlines are the selling point, from the car’s name to the flamethrower gag, which suggests the studio knows the bee puns are the part of the first film people remember.
SlashFilm’s headline says the trailer “Turns Jason Statham Into Batman,” and the joke is more specific than it first sounds. Clay now has a tricked-out car and an older man in glasses handing him gear, and that older man is Irons, who played Alfred to Ben Affleck’s Batman in Zack Snyder’s DC films, as SlashFilm points out. The gun that rises out of the passenger seat has drawn a second comparison, with htxt.africa arguing that it borrows from the armed Aston Martin sequence in “No Time to Die.” Either way, the teaser is reaching for a gadget-heavy, slightly comic register that the first film only flirted with, and it might be the clearest sign yet of how much the new director wants to put his own stamp on the series.
That director is the real story here. Ayer made the first film as a grim revenge picture with a sense of humor about itself. Tjahjanto comes out of a harder school, the Indonesian action cinema of “Headshot” and “The Night Comes for Us,” where fights run long, bodies pile up and the violence is the whole point. He has been open about wanting to push the sequel toward something bigger and stranger. CBR quotes him saying the villains will make the film feel like “something out of, like an anime, like manga pages.” JoBlo carries an earlier quote in which he said that if he cannot make a Punisher film yet, he will “turn Adam Clay into my own version of The Punisher.”
Even the writing credit is unsettled. People, AV Club and the cast sheet BroadwayWorld published on release day name Kurt Wimmer, who wrote the first film, and Zak Penn, while ComingSoon, CBR and MovieWeb credit Umair Aleem. Polygon reports that Wimmer worked on the sequel for some time before the script was handed to Aleem. Wimmer is a producer either way, alongside Statham and Chris Long, and Miramax is back as a production company, as the logo at the start of the teaser shows. Amazon MGM first showed footage to theater owners at CinemaCon in April, and the film was shot late last year, so with three months to go before release, a longer trailer seems likely.
Statham has kept busy in the meantime, with “A Working Man” last year and “Shelter” and “Mutiny” this year, but “The Beekeeper” remains the one audiences seem fondest of, sitting at 71 percent with critics and 92 percent with audiences on Rotten Tomatoes. This teaser is selling exactly what those audiences liked, bee puns and all, and that may well be enough to carry a January release again. The risk is that a story which began with one man’s grief for a friend turns into a gadget movie, and a machine gun in the passenger seat is a long way from a barn full of hives.
What Do You Think? Is Klementieff playing a rogue Beekeeper hunting Clay, or an ally he has not met yet? Does a Westwyld who hands Clay a car and a minigun undo what made him a threat in the first film, or is the reversal the fun of it? And with Tjahjanto promising villains out of “manga pages,” how far into the absurd can this series go before the revenge story underneath stops mattering?
See you on the next binge!
