Last week, we reported that The Raid director Gareth Evans was giving up on pursuing The Raid 3. Evans said:

The Raid 1 and 2 were incredible for me, but I just didn’t want to be doing The Raids all the time. And the more time has gone on from that, the less interested I’ve been to go back there. What we did with The Raid 2, we kinda close that off nicely, so it didn’t really appeal to me to jump back into that world again… The Raid 3 was… at one point it was on my radar. I had a full idea. I know what the storyline would have been. But I think enough time has passed now that I think I’m not likely to go back and revisit it. We had a lot of fun making those films, and I think we came to a nice, sort of natural conclusion with it. And I think sometimes you can have a little bit too much of a good thing.

Now Evans has revealed what the story for The Raid 3 would have been. Speaking to JoBlo, Evans revealed that The Raid 3 would have been more about the gangs rather than Iko Uwais’ character, Rama:

I knew what I wanted to do with The Raid 3, I knew what that story was going to be. If I was ever going to make it, it really had to have happened after we made The Raid 2. The storyline was going to pick up – I’ll give you a little bit of it – if you were watching The Raid 2 and rewound from the ending about 15-20 minutes back to when Goto gives instructions to his right-hand man to go kill the police, kill the politicians, ‘kill everyone that we work with, we’re going to start fresh,’ that was going to be the first scene of The Raid 3. It was going to be more about the yakuza than it was going to be about Rama; Rama was not really going to feature in that storyline much at all, it was going to be about the bosses in Japan realizing that someone in Jakarta that represented them started to fuck with the politicians and the police in a country they don’t belong in. It was going to be the fallout from that.” “It was going to be a 95 minutes, 100 minutes, sort of… escape into the jungles of Indonesia type of thing. But it really needed to be made at that period of time. Four years, five years later to go back and try to recreate that, it felt a bit disingenuous. I made three martial arts films in a row, I wanted to explore other things first. It was always a cool idea, but it stopped being really special for me. The Raid, it gave me an awful lot that I’m very appreciative about, but that adventure is kind of over now.”

That sounds like a neat way to expand the story, especially since the first two Raid movies were very much a part of Jakarta’s urban landscape. However, without Rama at the forefront, I wonder if the audience would have been as invested in seeing bad guys fight bad guys.

As it stands, The Raid 3 will likely remain a fascinating “What if?” as Evans moves onto other projects. His new movie, Apostle, arrives on Netflix on October 12th.