Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively to reunite for A Simple Favor 2—despite events of A Simple Favor 1
Director Paul Feig will reunite with Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively for an unexpected follow-up to the nasty-smart 2018 comedy thriller
Looking back 6 years later, there’s something almost bizarre about the existence, and success, of Paul Feig’s dark comedy thriller A Simple Favor. A $20 million movie making a nice $100 million return, based pretty much entirely on the concept “People might like to watch Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively tear each other (and the concept of mommy vloggers) apart”? In theaters, not streaming? What miraculous world is this?
And yet, the film was apparently successful enough—both at the box office, and in whatever personal sense determines the schedules of people like Kendrick and Lively—that it’s now officially getting a sequel, with Feig coming back to direct. And, given how the original movie ended—at the risk of spoilers, not everyone was exactly free to come and go by the time things wrapped up—we’re kind of charmed by how blithe the plot description for the sequel is: “The sequel will see the return of Stephanie (Kendrick) and Emily (Lively) as they head to the beautiful island of Capri, Italy, for Emily’s extravagant wedding to a rich Italian businessman. Along with the glamorous guests, expect murder and betrayal to RSVP for a wedding with more twists and turns than the road from the Marina Grande to the Capri town square.” Because what could say “fun in the sun” like vacationing with people who may or may not have tried to kill you in the previous film?
News of A Simple Favor 2 comes at what we might characterize as a “weird” time in Feig’s career, which has never quite recovered from the reception that greeted 2016's Ghostbusters; his most recent film was The School Of Good And Evil, which landed unceremoniously on Netflix in 2022 after years of development hell. He’s currently got a John Cena/Awkwafina comedy, Grand Death Lotto on the books, but he’s definitely at the point where a solid hit, and an injection of Lively and Kendrick’s undeniable chemistry, might be required to get things moving again.