Will Merrick and Nick Johnson, who edited “Searching,” slid behind the camera to make their feature directorial debut on “Missing.” They also wrote the screenplay, based on a story by Aneesh Chaganty and producer Sev Ohanian. Natalie Qasabian, who produced “Searching,” is also back as a producer this time around, and in an interview this week, the team told me they knew they wanted to continue the alien subplot, but didn’t want to simply rehash what they’d already done. Ohanian, who is “the big fighter for these Easter eggs,” first cooked up an idea that ended up being scrapped due to real-world circumstances.
“I initially wanted to make a storyline in which the aftermath of whatever happened with the aliens led to a mysterious illness that’s spreading across the world, and people are starting to show signs,” Ohanian explained. “Almost like ‘The Last of Us,’ but more alien zombies. And I think with the pandemic, that felt like too ‘been there, done that.'”
So Ohanian was mulling over ideas with his assistant about what else they could do instead, and they landed on something spectacular.
“In the background of this movie, if you watch really closely — and especially if you’re watching at home and you pause at the right times — you will see that there was an extremely unexpected storyline, which is a superhero origin storyline that is literally pulled from the ashes of what happened with the aliens last time around. It has all the exact same story beats that you would see in any Marvel movie, it just is happening in the corners.”