Duncan Jones' MUTE Takes Place After MOON, and We'll Find Out What Happened to Sam Rockwell's Character

Duncan Jones' Moon is a terrific sci-fi movie, and I was pleased to hear that his longtime passion project Mute — which he begins shooting next week — takes place in the same cinematic universe. I haven't paid too much attention to the details in the intervening years (Jones has been wanting to make Mute for a long time, even before Moon came out in 2009), so while this may be old news to some of you, I just learned a couple of new details about the connection between the two films and I wanted to share them with you.

First of all, here's the synopsis for Mute in case you have no idea what I'm even talking about:

Berlin. Forty years from today. A roiling city of immigrants, where East crashes against West in a science-fiction Casablanca. Leo Beiler (Alexander Skarsgard), a mute bartender has one reason and one reason only for living here, and she’s disappeared. But when Leo’s search takes him deeper into the city’s underbelly, an odd pair of American surgeons (led by Paul Rudd) seem to be the only recurring clue, and Leo can’t tell if they can help, or who he should fear most.

Now I'm going to drop some spoilers for the end of Moon. At the end of that film, one of the Sam Bell clones (played by Sam Rockwell) escapes from the Lunar Industries facility, returns to Earth, and blows the whistle on the company's unethical practice of using clones instead of humans to run the show up there.

So here's the connection. Mute takes place eleven years after Lunar Industries first set up the moon-based facility, and Rockwell is supposed to cameo in the new movie as a way of providing some answers about what happened to that Sam Bell clone who made his way to Earth. /Film points out that Jones wants to make a third film that takes place in this universe as well; not much is known about that one, other than that it has a female lead, but as Jones told Bleeding Cool a few years ago:

You’ll definitely see the world expanding. As far as the epilogue of Sam Bell’s adventures there are going to be… the plan was to doMute first. Mute is a sci-fi story that takes place in Berlin. It’s very much a city film. Moon’s obviously a film about isolation, about as isolated as you can get on the far side of the moon. And there’s a third science fiction film, which will hopefully be the next film, which is a very different thing, which I can’t say too much about right now. But all three of those are connected in that they all take place within the same universe and each one of them will have just a couple of little fingers into each other’s story, so you’ll… just a little link between them all. So you’ll find out a little bit more about what happens in Moon in Mute and in this other film.

I'm very excited to see Jones expand the universe he created seven years ago, and pay homage to films like Blade Runner and Casablanca in his own unique way. Mute sounds awesome, and I'm glad he's finally able to get it off the ground.