Robert De Niro has a dream. Admittedly it’s not a great dream – it involves directing a couple of sequels to that boring movie about the CIA he made – but technically it’s still a dream.

Forget the fact that so few people watched The Good Shepherd when it was released that demand for even one sequel is about the same as demand for a sequel to the Ebola virus, because this is Robert De Niro’s dream. You can’t deny an old man his dream, can you?

Actually, we’re right behind Robert De Niro’s decision to keep churning out sequels to The Good Shepherd. With his current hit rate, one of them’s bound to be a knockabout family comedy co-starring Ben Stiller, and only an idiot would turn down the chance of seeing that, right?

The Good Shepherd, the Robert De Niro-directed meditation on the history of the CIA, wasn’t exactly box office dynamite, and we think we know why:

1 - It was a basic trade description fraud. The Good Shepherd? Good? We can’t help but feel that if Robert De Niro had called his movie The Mediocre Shepherd or The Excruciatingly Long Shepherd he’d have engendered a lot more trust in the moviegoing audience.

2 – Films starring Angelina Jolie where she doesn’t play a slightly fetishistic female assassin are rubbish. Everyone knows that.

3 – The Good Shepherd was never going to attract the kids because all the words in the title were spelt correctly. The Good Shepherd? Boring. Da Nang Shep-Shep? Now that sounds like a cool movie.

But, regardless of why it failed, Robert De Niro hasn’t been put off by the public’s antipathy towards The Good Shepherd, to the point where he actually wants to make two more of them. According to CHUD:

De Niro said he would like to make two sequels to CIA Cold War drama The Good Shepherd — one bringing the action forward from 1961 to 1989, the other following its hero, Edward Wilson (Matt Damon), up to the present day. Although he is not working on research for the concluding parts of the hoped-for trilogy, De Niro said being in central Europe offered a good opportunity to begin thinking about the material.

Although the idea of sitting through another two bone-dry, stupidly-long excitement-vacuum movies about the CIA sounds like a living hell, we shouldn’t stop Robert De Niro from seeing through the creative vision he has for The Good Shepherd – especially since he’s apparently modelling the trilogy on the Lord Of The Rings movies, where the second one will be about Matt Damon walking across a mountain and the third one will be about an army of American spies charging at an army of Islamic terrorists across a giant field for three hours.

Also, the workload created by making more Good Shepherd movies means that Robert De Niro will have fewer chances to make more reputation-sullying late-period movies with Al Pacino. And for that reason we’re in.