departed in April 2009 due to "excessive workload", leaving the task to Evan Spiliotopoulos. In June 2009, Bekmambetov said that pre-production for Wanted 2 was about to get started, with filming scheduled to begin in late fall or winter. The film will have a reported budget of $150 million and will be shot in the United States, India, and Russia. He also added that some of the characters would resurrect, particularly Fox and The Exterminator. On September, the director added that even without a finished script Bazelevs had already done previsualization of the action scenes. In 2010, after reports that Angelina Jolie had pulled out of the sequel, Millar said that the script would be rewritten to remove Fox's return, so production could start that year for a late 2011 release. Eventually the production did not take off, leading Bekmambetov to work on Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter instead. In a 2011 Q&A, producer Jim Lemley said that "Wanted 2 sounds like it will not happen any time soon if at all". That same year, James McAvoy said, regarding the sequel, "I think the studio is keen to make it, and we really want to make it, but we want to make it if it's right and when it's right, and that might not be ever." McAvoy also expressed interest in a sequel focusing on a character other than Wesley. Universal later brought Wanted screenwriters Michael Brandt and Derek Haas to write the sequel, which Haas described as happening "right after the events that just happened; it'll pick up Wesley a few years later and go back in for another round", while also being "Fox-less and loom-less." Haas would later detail that the script featured a new female protagonist, who Wesley would recruit "sort of in the Fox role." Bekmambetov declared during the interviews for Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter that after many years of indecision as the Wanted sequel stalled in development, he proposed an idea to the screenwriters wherein the plot followed Wesley while featuring "a great twist." McAvoy declared that since he "had a blast making the first Wanted", he would make a sequel regardless of the quality of the script; however, he also acknowledged that the extended time the film spent in development "suggests to me that they're not finding it very easy to come up with a story that they're passionate about, so we'll have to wait