Elizabeth was never meant to be a single film it seems, the original Director Shekhar KapurShekhar Kapur has taken the realm of the second film and has always planned there to be a trilogy. Filming begins on the second part next month.

The Guardian has the full story:

Picking up the tale 15 years on from the events of Elizabeth, The Golden Age - which will be filmed on location in Cambridge and Ely and in Shepperton Studios - will touch on the queen's relationship with Mary Queen of Scots (Samantha Morton), and climax on the eve of the Armada...

...Geoffrey Rush will reprise his role as the spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham; Michael Sheen will appear as his brother. Shekhar Kapur will again direct, and Working Title favourite Rhys Ifans will appear as a priest. Absent is Joseph Fiennes as Robert Dudley...Elizabeth's virginal but roving eye will this time alight on Clive Owen's Sir Walter Raleigh.

It raises the question of if we are really interested in seeing such an old story retold, I mean what could it possibly teach this modern day audience? There are, according to Kapur, many parallels.

...the underlying thread...is "immortality and divinity; the way that great rulers always think of themselves as divine. Look at Blair, Bush, Bin Laden, the way that they talk about God. The script, he said, also engages with a burning issue of our time: religious extremism. It pits Elizabeth, for the purposes of the film, as a paragon of tolerance against the Catholic fanaticism of Philip II of Spain.

I'm not so sure, it does sound like there's a connection trying to be made here. In a time when films are being created about the burning issues of the war on terror and terrorism in general, is this just clutching at straws to try and make the connections and keep this film somewhere on that bandwagon? Is there really an appetite for two more movies on Elizabeth I?