Name: The Night Comes for Us
Director: Timo Tjahjanto
Released: 2018

The Beekeeper began as a stand-alone revenge thriller — a retired assassin settling scores with the phishing scammers who robbed his landlady — and its sequel aims much higher up the food chain. The first teaser for The Beekeeper 2, released by Amazon MGM Studios on Thursday, turns Jason Statham’s Adam Clay against the secret organization that made him, and it hands the franchise to Indonesian action director Timo Tjahjanto rather than David Ayer, who directed the original.

As Deadline reported, the new story makes Clay a wanted man. The Beekeeper network goes rogue and sets its sights on controlling the government, and to clear his name Clay has to protect the president of the United States while taking on the very group that trained him. The sneak peek leans into the character’s blunt appeal, cutting Statham’s fight work to Metallica’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” before closing on one of the actor’s trademark one-liners.

The change behind the camera is the real chess move. Tjahjanto came up as one half of The Mo Brothers with Kimo Stamboel, co-directing the horror film Macabre and the Iko Uwais vehicle Headshot, before his solo feature The Night Comes for Us became the first Indonesian original production for Netflix — a gory, close-quarters homage to Hong Kong action cinema. He has since moved into Hollywood with Nobody 2, and The Beekeeper 2 gives him a star-driven studio franchise built around exactly the kind of brutal hand-to-hand combat he is known for.

Several faces return from the first film: Emmy Raver-Lampman and Bobby Naderi as FBI agents Verona Parker and Matt Wiley, Jemma Redgrave as President Jessica Danforth and Jeremy Irons as former CIA director Wallace Westwyld. New to the hive are Pom Klementieff, Yara Shahidi and Adam Copeland, the wrestler formerly known as Edge. Deadline credits the screenplay to Kurt Wimmer, who wrote the original, and Zak Penn.

Statham also produces alongside Chris Long and Wimmer, while Ayer stays on as an executive producer. The stakes for Amazon MGM are measurable: The Beekeeper grossed $162.6 million worldwide in 2024 against a budget reported at $40 million or less, one of the more efficient original action releases of that year. The Beekeeper 2 opens in theaters on January 15, 2027.

That date puts the sequel back in the same mid-January window where the first film opened — only this time, Clay’s target is not a call center full of scammers but the hive itself.