After Sylvester Stallone bitterly disappointed 2000 A.D. fans in the mid-‘90s with Dredd is one of the greatest comic book movies in recent memory.
Unfortunately, since the studio neglected to give Dredd a proper marketing campaign, the movie bombed at the box office and we’ll probably never get to see the sequel we were promised. But there are a ton of plot points that haven’t been wrapped up yet.
Judge Anderson’s Career
Throughout the first movie, Judge Dredd is training a rookie named Judge Anderson. Much like Tyne Daly in The Enforcer, Anderson presents an ethical counterpoint to the grizzled veteran lawman she’s teamed up with.
At the end of the movie, Dredd tells the Chief Judge that Anderson ed the test (despite getting disarmed), so a sequel to the movie could explore the next stage of Anderson’s career as a judge.
Dredd’s Origins
While Dredd tells audiences everything they need to know about Judge Dredd as a character, it didn’t function as an origin story like most comic book movies hoping to start a franchise.
But Alex Garland has said that if he’s ever lucky enough to get to work on a sequel to Dredd, then the movie would explore the titular antihero’s little-known backstory.
Mega-City One
In the Judge Dredd comics, Mega-City One is a sprawling metropolis that covers most of the Eastern United States and parts of Canada. Despite its villains offering a microcosm of the crime rampant in the city-state, Dredd was mostly confined to a single building, so it only just scraped the vast scope of Mega-City One.
There’s currently a TV series in the works set in Mega-City One that will flesh out the setting and feature Dredd among other judges, so hopefully that project won’t get lost in development hell.
Dredd & Anderson’s Mentor-Mentee Relationship
The mentor-mentee relationship developed by Judges Dredd and Anderson during their infiltration of a drug lord’s high-rise was an instantly compelling dynamic, and Dredd was just the beginning.
Taking down Ma-Ma was the first investigation that Dredd and Anderson collaborated on, but based on their strong working relationship, it probably won’t be the last.
The Other Judges
While Dredd focused on the titular character’s dynamic with Judge Anderson on her training day, there are plenty of other judges working for the system that Judge Dredd could team up with in a sequel.
A couple of other judges were introduced in Dredd, like Judge Guthrie and Judge Volt, but they only made brief appearances and need to be fleshed out in a follow-up movie.
Dredd’s Fascism
One of the more morally challenging aspects of Judge Dredd’s characterization is that his actions sometimes border on the fascistic. When we meet him in Dredd, the power of judge, jury, and executioner is starting to go to his head.
In a sequel, he could finally take those fascistic tendencies too far. Fascism is rarely explored from an antihero’s side in blockbuster cinema; a Dredd sequel could explore uncharted territory.
The Chief Judge
The Chief Judge was played by Rakie Ayola in Dredd. At the end of the movie, she asks Dredd for his evaluation of Judge Anderson and he decides to give her a despite the fact she didn’t quite meet all the criteria.
Dredd’s relationship with the Chief Judge could be further expanded in a sequel, as could the Chief Judge’s role in the local politics of Mega-City One.
Corrupt Judges
Due to the sky-high crime rate in Mega-City One, there’s no way that the judges are able to answer every emergency call. Dredd even says in the first movie that they can only respond to a certain number of crimes.
Another problem with the system is shown to be corrupt judges. Dredd introduces more corrupt judges (Lex, Alvarez, Chan, Kaplan etc.) than non-corrupt ones.
Cursed Earth
While Mega-City One is a massive urban development that houses 800 million citizens, the rest of what used to be the United States is a barren wasteland known as “the Cursed Earth.”
In any post-apocalyptic story about people living in a city that was built to keep out the doomed riff-raff of the wasteland, the characters invariably have to leave the city and venture into the wasteland at some point. It’s like Chekhov’s wasteland.
Judge Death
One of Alex Garland’s early drafts of the script for Dredd utilized the undead villain Judge Death, but this character was eventually cut as the story was streamlined into more of a character study.
If a sequel is ever made, then Judge Death should appear alongside the Dark Judges. He’s one of Dredd’s most fascinating enemies in the comics and he’d be an eye-popping spectacle on the big screen.
