Timo Tjahjanto, the Beekeeper 2 director whose best films are still made at home

Timo Tjahjanto

Photo: John Sears / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	September 4, 1980 Wilhelmshaven, West Germany
Occupation	Film director
Known for	Nobody 2, The Night Comes For Us, V/H/S/2
Awards	Piala Maya

Within a day of the news that he would direct Jason Statham’s next sequel, Timo Tjahjanto made himself a promise in public. He had one more Hollywood film ahead of him, he wrote on X, and after that it was going to be “either The Big 4 or The Shadow Strays sequel.” The Hollywood film turned out to be The Beekeeper 2, which Amazon MGM is now selling with a teaser built on Statham’s fists and a Metallica song. The promise held. Days after that teaser went out, Tjahjanto posted a clapperboard from Indonesia marking the first day of shooting on the follow-up to his Netflix action comedy The Big 4.

That double life is the most interesting thing about him right now. In Los Angeles he is the director studios call when a franchise built by somebody else needs harder blows: he inherited Bob Odenkirk’s Hutch Mansell from Ilya Naishuller for Nobody 2, and Statham’s Adam Clay from David Ayer. At home he is an author who writes his own scripts, runs his own company, Merah Production, and stages some of the most punishing violence a streaming service has ever carried. The open question is whether the second career can keep feeding the first without being swallowed by it.

He is Indonesian, although the record starts somewhere else. Timothy Tjahjanto was born on September 4, 1980, in Wilhelmshaven, the North Sea port in what was then West Germany. He studied at the School of Visual Arts in Australia, where he met Kimo Stamboel, and came into film sideways, working freelance as a storyboard artist and photographer. The influences he names are horror ones: Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Tommy Lee Wallace’s 1990 television version of Stephen King’s It.

With Stamboel he became one half of the Mo Brothers. Their short Dara was folded into the 2008 anthology Takut: Faces of Fear, and its feature-length expansion, Macabre, released at home in 2009 as Rumah Dara, gave Indonesian horror a genteel cannibal matriarch in Shareefa Daanish’s Dara. The film travelled the festival circuit well and, as Tjahjanto later admitted on a podcast with the director Joko Anwar, made little money. Genre producers abroad noticed anyway. He shot a segment of The ABCs of Death and, with Gareth Evans of The Raid, co-directed “Safe Haven”, the Indonesian cult episode of V/H/S/2 that premiered at Sundance in 2013.

The brothers followed with Killers, a Japanese-Indonesian thriller about two murderers linked by the videos they post online, with Kazuki Kitamura and Oka Antara, which went to Sundance in 2014. Then came Headshot, an Iko Uwais vehicle that earned the pair a Citra Award nomination for best director in 2016.

Working alone, Tjahjanto pulled apart the two genres he had been mixing. May the Devil Take You, in which Chelsea Islan digs into her dying father’s past in his old house, played at the Venice Film Festival and won him the Piala Maya for best director. The Night Comes for Us, released the same year, was the first Indonesian original Netflix ever made: Joe Taslim as a triad enforcer who spares one girl during a massacre and brings his whole syndicate down on himself, Iko Uwais as the old friend sent after him, and close-quarters violence staged as an open homage to 1980s Hong Kong action cinema. Netflix kept coming back. The Big 4, about a police detective who drags four retired assassins back to work, reached the platform’s global top ten in December 2022 and spent two weeks at the top of its non-English film chart. The Shadow Strays cast Aurora Ribero as 13, a teenage killer who defies her mentor to save a boy from a crime syndicate; it premiered in Toronto’s Midnight Madness section in 2024 and entered the top ten in 87 countries.

Those numbers hide a thinner Hollywood record than the announcements suggest. His first studio attachments stalled. New Line’s remake of Train to Busan, retitled The Last Train to New York, was given an April 2023 release date and then pulled from it, and an Under Siege reboot for HBO Max was still in script development the last time he discussed it. When Nobody 2 finally reached cinemas in August 2025, Universal’s sequel opened below projections and finished at roughly $40 million worldwide against a $25 million budget, well short of the first film’s $57.5 million. Most critics credited his action and blamed the script; the Indonesian film site Montase argued that the studio’s family-friendly tone held back exactly the brutality that got him hired. That is the trap in the franchise route: Tjahjanto is chosen for his excess and then asked to ration it. Even his own films carry a cost reviewers keep naming. At nearly two and a half hours, The Shadow Strays was praised for its fights and faulted for its length.

Tjahjanto married the actress Sigi Wimala, who appears in Macabre, in 2009. They have two children and divorced in 2021.

The Beekeeper 2 is the larger test. The sequel turns Adam Clay against the secret network that trained him, which has gone rogue and wants control of the government, leaving Clay to protect the president of the United States. Jeremy Irons, Emmy Raver-Lampman, Bobby Naderi and Jemma Redgrave return; Pom Klementieff, Yara Shahidi and the wrestler Adam Copeland are new. It opens in American cinemas on January 15, 2027, and the first film’s $162.6 million worldwide gross is the bar he will be measured against.

Past it, the slate leans home. The Big 4 Part Two, whose draft script carried the subtitle Badai Pasti Kembali, began filming on October 17, 2026, with the cinematographer Batara Goempar back behind the camera. He has teased the return of the assassin from The Shadow Strays, and he is attached to Sleeping Dogs, Simu Liu’s adaptation of the Hong Kong undercover-cop video game, which still needs Square Enix to sign the rights deal. Whatever the Statham sequel earns in January, the clapperboard has already answered the question he set himself: the first film he makes after Hollywood is one he wrote.

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