Edgar Wright may not direct Baby Driver 2 he admits, although the script for the film is complete.
Edgar Wright is currently doing the press rounds for his psychological drama Last Night In Soho, and as such we’ve seen him discuss al manner of subjects, including where you could go next with the James Bond franchise, even if he didn’t give too many of his thoughts away. The director has been a little more open about returning to the world of Baby Driver though, the crime caper flick about a getaway drive with tinnitus, that has proven to be his most commercially successful film so far.
In an interview with No Time To Die director Cary Joji Fukunaga for Interview Magazine, Wright discusses his reluctance to revisit a world he has already spent plenty of time in, despite revealing that the script for the film is complete:
“If I did the sequel – and in fact I’ve already written a script – I’d have to find a way to make it fun for me. The idea of doing a straight Xerox is just not interesting because, as you know, these films take at least two years and in our cases, because of the pandemic, they took even longer. My rule of thumb is you have to really want to do it. We’ve both been in situations where we have walked away from a studio franchise movie because we weren’t feeling it. I know that we share many things in common, and that’s one of them”.
Now Wright wouldn’t be the first director to adopt a lukewarm response to returning for a sequel, before changing his mind, but we’d argue that (as much as we’d love to see him helm a follow-up to Baby Driver) if this is how he feels now, upon completing the script, then maybe it would be wise to step away.
The pandemic seems to have perhaps altered Wright’s thinking, with the desire to push into something new after dealing for so long with Last Night In Soho, which suffered a significantly delayed launch.
As he puts it, “I don’t think I’ve ever done exactly the same thing twice in a row. In fact, the reason I decided to do Last Night In Soho was because at the time when Baby Driver was out, it was doing an awards run and got Oscar nominations, and I was getting a lot of pressure to jump straight into doing a sequel. And I just wasn’t ready to do the same story again. It was a conscious thing of switching gears.”
It seems that Sony are very keen for a sequel, so with or without Wright, it looks like we may be getting one. Personally, I’d like to see Wright tackle something new, most notably his planned adaptation of the dystopian Stephen King novel, The Running Man, which he is said to be developing.
We’ll let you know more as we hear it. You can read the full piece at Interview Magazine here and it is well worth your time.
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