“Just hope it goes better than last time,” Melissanthi Mahut’s character says in the trailer while paddling out to sea. What happened last time? “You don’t want to know,” warns Statham’s Jonas.

The cast of Meg 2: The Trench also includes Sienna Guillory, Sergio Peris-Mencheta, Cliff Curtis, Shuya Sophia Cai, Page Kennedy, and Chinese superstar Wu Jing. The movie is directed by the British Ben Wheatley, whose fascinatingly eclectic filmography includes 2011’s Kill List, 2013’s A Field in England, 2015’s High-Rise, 2020’s Rebecca, and the TV show Doctor Who.

The Meg was directed by Jon Turtletaub and starred Statham as a rescue diver named Jonas Taylor who battles an enormous Megalodon shark. The film came out in the summer of 2018 and proved a huge hit, earning $530 million at the global box office.

Ahead of the original film’s release, Statham told EW that there likely would be a sequel to The Meg if the movie was a success.

“I think it’s like anything in this day and age — if it makes money, there’s obviously an appetite to make more money,” the Transporter and Hobbs & Shaw actor said. “And if it doesn’t do well, they’ll soon sweep it under the carpet. But that’s the way Hollywood works.”

Statham also revealed that he had come into close contact with some real-life sharks at the time of the film’s shoot.

“We took a trip down to Fiji, and we went diving with some bull sharks,” he said. “They hand feed them, and it’s a spectacular thing to see. These things are three meters in length, huge big things — when you’re in the ocean, and you’re like six, eight, 12 inches away from these things, it’s quite an ordeal. There were 20 or 30 of these things and they were hand-feeding [them] big tuna heads. We got very very close and it was a spectacular moment. To swim in close proximity to a big, three-meter shark is to be recommended to all and everyone.”