Rosa Salazar Urges ‘Alita’ Fans to Show Disney There’s Demand for Sequel: ‘Buy Those Blu-rays’

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Robert Rodriguez’s “Alita: Battle Angel” was one of 20th Century Fox’s final theatrical releases prior to the Disney-Fox merger. With $404 million worldwide, the manga adaptation was far from the box office disaster many feared while still not being a breakaway hit that makes a sequel a no-brainer. Rodriguez ended “Alita” with the clear intention of making a second installment, but whether new parent company Disney goes ahead with an “Alita 2” remains a a question. One person who is hoping for a sequel is Alita herself, Rosa Salazar.

“I would play Alita until my last breath,” Salazar recently told /Film. “I would, and thanks to the performance capture technology, I probably could.”

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Salazar said she has yet to hear any updates from the studio on the possibility for an “Alita” sequel, but she encouraged fans to do whatever they can to prove to Disney that demand for another “Alita” film is real. “Buy those Blu-rays,” she said while confirming, “But no, I haven’t heard anything yet.”

“Yeah, I mean, they had a crazy merger,” Salazar said about Disney. “People are gaining jobs, people are losing jobs. The whole Disney/Fox acquisition is so involved, this isn’t the right time for me to call Alan Horn and be like, ‘Hey bro, I know you got a lotta stuff going on, but like what about ‘Alita 2’?”

“Alita” earned favorable reviews from critics and became a cult favorite among a certain contingent of moviegoers, who have started championing for an “Alita” sequel on social media using the #AlitaArmy hashtag. The first movie ended with the revelation that Edward Norton was cast as the villainous Nova, who was often mentioned throughout the movie.

Rodriguez later revealed he cast Norton with the intention of the actor playing a main role in the sequel, even if he was unsure a sequel would get made. Other minor characters such as Michelle Rodriguez’s mentor Gelda and Jai Courtney’s motorball champion Jashugan were briefly included in “Alita” in hopes of fleshing them out more in a sequel.

“There was almost no way to tell this story without including those people,” Rodriguez told ComingSoon.net. “You had to get a sense if [Alita] had been trained before by scenes with the Michelle character, you had to see Gelda at some point. They’re talking about how the game is played, Jashugin is one of the major players. He has a much bigger role later in the books. We didn’t want to just put somebody in. What if there was a sequel? We had to cast three people without really having a part for them to be basing it on to see if they wanted to do it.”

Next up for Salazar is a starring role in Amazon’s rotoscope series “Undone,” which premieres September 13.

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