Why ‘White House Down’ Never Got a Sequel—and Probably Never Will

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SOMETIMES, NETFLIX has the power to create hits. The show Manifest, for example, was canceled by NBC (where it originally aired), only to gain a large following on Netflix before the streaming giant revived it, much to the delight of fans. Netflix also has a history of taking over the reigns of hit movies, turning them into their own original franchises (see the production of Glass Onion following the success of Knives Out). Could these two situations, then, be put together? The 2013 movie White House Down has been one of the platform's biggest movies of late, gaining a large audience that it never found upon release.

Directed by Roland Emmerich (of Independence Day fame) and with a pair of bona fide stars in Channing Tatum and Jamie Foxx, White House Down always had the potential to be a blockbuster smash. But when the movie came out a decade ago, it received lukewarm reviews (51% from critics and 62% from fans on Rotten Tomatoes) and grossed only a modest $205 million (compared to its $150 million budget). The seeming recipe for success wasn't quite one for disaster, but the movie didn't exactly go down as a hit, either.

The 2023 landscape is a little different. The bar for people watching a movie at home, on Netflix, is significantly different from going to a movie in 2013. If Netflix blasts the faces of Jamie Foxx (playing the US President) and Channing Tatum (playing a capitol police officer protecting him from a terrorist siege in the White House) to the home page of people looking to wind down after a long day of work... well, it's not a super hard sell, and it only takes a click or two on the remote to start watching the movie. It's not hard to understand why people would be intrigued. Who wouldn't be?

And so White House Down has skyrocketed to the top of Netflix's charts, ahead of brand new movies like Run Rabbit Run (starring Succession's Sarah Snook) and James Cameron's all-time classic (and surprisingly timely!) Titanic.

It's reasonable for people to begin to wonder, especially if they enjoyed the movie, whether we could see more of Channing Tatum's John Cale and Jamie Foxx's President James Sawyer.

So what's the deal? Is White House 2 happening? Was it ever?

Will there be a White House Down 2?

As a Magic 8 Ball might say, "Signs Point to No." It does not seem particularly likely that White House Down will have a sequel, and given its modest box office returns and generally tepid reaction at the time, it's not likely that there were ever plans for one.

All the involved White House Down parties have been booked and busy; star Channing Tatum has his foreseeable future mapped out, as he'll appear in Greg Berlanti's Project Artemis, Zoe Kravitz's directorial debut Pussy Island, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Wingmen.

And while Jamie Foxx is also constantly busy (he'll appear in Netflix's They Cloned Tyrone later this month and has several other films scheduled for future release), he's currently in the midst of an unknown health crisis. We're hoping for his swift recovery before even thinking about any other upcoming projects.

If White House Down's empty-minded action fun is what you enjoyed, we recommend checking out director Roland Emmerich's other movies. He's best known for Independence Day, but The Day After Tomorrow and 2022's Moonfall should also scratch the same kind of itch.

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