The odds of us ever seeing The Raid 3 are slim. However, director Gareth Evans, who gifted cinema with not one, but perhaps two of the greatest action movies ever made with The Raid: Redemption and The Raid 2, had it all planned out. Now, six years after the second installment was release, the filmmaker has laid it all out on the table.

Gareth Evans was recently a guest on Empire Spoiler Special Podcast. During the conversation, talk turned to The Raid 3. It turns out, the movie wouldn't have centered on Iko Uwais' Rama because Evans couldn't fathom pulling him away from his wife and child again. Instead, the third movie would have opened up the universe of the Asian criminal underworld even more. Here's what Evans had to say about it.

"The story was going to go back in time to the moment in The Raid 2 when the Goto Gang, the Japanese gang, are having a meeting, and Goto tells his right-hand man to take care of it, wipe out every corrupt cop and politician that they have on the books and start fresh. The Raid 3 would begin with Rama coming out of that building after having killed everybody and saying 'No, I'm done'. He walks away to [police officer] Bunawar, who'll be waiting for him in his car, he gets in and drives away."

"And you stay with the Japanese gang, who are like, 'What the f*** do we do now? Everyone's dead, we've got no-one to kill.' They get into their car, and as they're driving along all of a sudden this other car rocks up alongside them and just blitzes them, and the cars crash. Goto, his son, and his right-hand man are the only remaining survivors from that attack, and it cuts to credits and says 'The Raid 3.'"

Amazingly, that was just the setup. Gareth Evans did not stop there, as he then laid out what would happen in the rest of the movie. We then would have gone back in time for what sounds like it would have made for some great action, as well as some dramatic tension.

"Then it would jump back in time. The idea was that the right-hand man, after being told to kill off all the politicians and cops and wipe the clean slate, would call back to Tokyo to the big huge boss, and be like, 'Goto's going f*****g nuts. This is f*****g crazy, what do I do?' The call from HQ is, 'Keep him still, keep him close, we'll send people to take care of it, and if you do that for us, you can take over his turf.' The attack goes wrong, it's a kill squad from Japan who have turned up and taken out the Gotos. Goto has no idea that this right-hand man has betrayed him and set him up for the ambush."

It's here where things truly take a turn. Instead of mimicking what had been done in the first two movies, the proposed sequel would take things to a new location entirely; the jungle. Gareth Evans explained that he would have taken some inspiration from the Arnold Schwarzenegger classic Predator.

"They go off into hiding, all the way to the jungles of West Java. Goto arranges to meet up with this old mafia boss (played by) Christine Hakim, who has trained killers in her jungle retreat. She's providing protection for Goto because they go way back, she's the one who introduced him to Jakarta in the first place. The idea is this Japanese kill squad that's used to the streets of Tokyo suddenly have to deal with the terrain of a jungle-hunt, a bit like Predator in a way."

"Christine's militia, these guerrilla kids, would be taking care of this Japanese intrusion on their land. I didn't work out the whole thing, but at some point Goto's son would have got killed, he would have realised that it was the right-hand man who betrayed him all along, and they'd have some real gnarly tribal way of dealing with him. And Goto and this guerrilla gang of Indonesian killers would then go back to Tokyo in order to f*****g take care of the people that ordered to kill him."

So, now comes the big question, will The Raid 3 ever get made? This could be one of those never say never situations, but fans shouldn't be content to hold their breath. As Gareth Evans tells it, it seems like that ship may well have sailed as he's moved onto other projects.

"I definitely think it would have pissed off an awful lot of people, so maybe now they know what I had planned, people will be like, 'You know what, don't worry about The Raid 3, we're good! Before I knew it, I was five years down the line, I'd made Apostle, we were starting to get production going on Gangs Of London. I couldn't see myself going back out to make The Raid 3. My interests had moved on to other projects."

"You work with other people, you meet other people and want to work with them again, you want to try different things, you find a story that suddenly captures your attention and that's the thing you want to do next. Things get offered to you that are hard to pass up on."

Director Joe Carnahan, for a long time, had been developing a remake of The Raid alongside Frank Grillo. That has since been repurposed as an original concept, last we heard, and is still being developed, but no longer as a remake of Gareth Evans' 2011 action masterpiece. With that, it seems some things are better left untouched. This news comes to us via Empire