Josh Brolin has confirmed that "Sicario 3" is moving forward with production starting "soon", welcome news for fans of the gritty cartel thriller franchise written by Taylor Sheridan.
Brolin, who plays CIA operative Matt Graver in the series, recently told ScreenRant that a third installment "is happening." No specific start date, studio, or casting details beyond Brolin himself have emerged, but producer Thad Luckinbill offered his own confirmation in a separate interview with Entertainment Weekly.
The announcement marks a return for one of the most grounded and unflinching action franchises of the past decade, a series that treated the chaos of the U.S.-Mexico border and the drug trade with a seriousness Hollywood rarely musters. Sheridan wrote both previous films, and his involvement looms large over any third chapter, though he has not publicly commented on the project.
Luckinbill, who produced both the 2015 original and its 2018 sequel "Sicario: Day of the Soldado," spoke with Entertainment Weekly about the franchise's future. OutKick reported that the producer "kept his cards a bit closer to his chest" than Brolin but still called the project a "very real possibility."
His full quote left even less room for ambiguity:
"We're hoping to do it, so fingers crossed. It would be great to get to do another one for the fans. And, honestly, for me, too. Like, I'm a fan of it. Even though I produced it, I wanna see it."
That is not the language of a producer floating a trial balloon. Luckinbill, who also stars in Sheridan's series "Lioness," sounded like a man describing a project already in motion, just not yet ready for a full press rollout.
The original "Sicario" landed in 2015 as a thriller that refused to sanitize the drug war. Sheridan's script dropped audiences into the moral gray zone where federal agencies, cartel operatives, and desperate civilians collide along the southern border. Brolin's Matt Graver, a swaggering, flip-flop-wearing CIA man who treats covert operations like casual errands, became one of the more memorable characters in modern action cinema. Benicio del Toro co-starred as the haunted assassin Alejandro Gillick.
The sequel, "Day of the Soldado," arrived in 2018 with Brolin and del Toro reprising their roles. It pushed further into the world of cross-border smuggling and government-sanctioned violence, earning a loyal audience that has waited years for a third chapter.
Whether del Toro returns for the new film remains an open question. No cast announcements beyond Brolin's own confirmation have surfaced.
Taylor Sheridan has spent the years since "Day of the Soldado" building a television empire anchored by "Yellowstone" and its spinoffs. He is now described as an entertainment power player with multiple series and production deals running simultaneously. Separate reporting referenced by OutKick noted that Sheridan is returning to feature films after a five-year absence, with a NASA thriller and a political drama in the works.
Sheridan also made headlines recently for calling Los Angeles an "awful place" in an interview, a comment that tracks with the plainspoken, anti-establishment persona he has cultivated throughout his career.
A "Sicario" sequel fits neatly into that brand. The franchise never flinched from showing the consequences of porous borders, institutional corruption, and the human wreckage left behind by the drug trade. In an era when Hollywood often avoids those subjects or handles them with heavy-handed moralizing, Sheridan's approach stood apart by simply showing the reality and letting audiences draw their own conclusions.
No production timeline, filming location, or distributor has been announced. Brolin's use of "soon" is the only window into when cameras might roll.
If "Sicario 3" delivers the same unflinching honesty as its predecessors, it will arrive at a moment when Americans could use a reminder that the border crisis is not an abstraction, it is a story with real stakes, real victims, and real consequences that Hollywood has mostly been too comfortable to tell.
