At the end of her review of Netflix’s The Kissing Booth 2 for The A.V. Club, Caroline Siede noted that the movie “blatantly” teased a third installment that would continue the story of Joey King’s Elle and answer the question of whether she would go to Harvard with her boyfriend or Berkeley with her best friend (who is also her boyfriend’s brother). Well, it looks like fans of the Kissing Booth movies won’t have to wait very long, because Netflix and director Vince Marcello are already making a third one.
Actually, that’s not right. What we meant to say was that they’ve already made a third one. Yes, much like Back To The Future or Kill Bill, the third movie was apparently made at the same time as the second and is currently in post-production. This comes from Deadline, which says Netflix is planning to release it in 2021 and that the cast—including King, Jacob Elordi, Joel Courtney, Taylor Zakhar Perez, Meganne Young, Molly Ringwald, and beloved time-traveling shapeshifter Maisie Richardson-Sellers—will all be back. That could be because the producers tricked them into thinking they were making one five-hour movie instead of a pair of two-and-a-half-hour movies, but Hollywood almost certainly has rules against tricking actors like that.
Either way, this shows a convenient bit of timely prescience for the Kissing Booth series. Teen Vogue says filming on the second one ended last August, so if we assume filming on the third one also ended last August, that means they were both wrapped well before the coronavirus shut everything down. Clearly, this means movie and TV productions should just make as many episodes or sequels as they can at once so they can bank content for the next pandemic. It might put a lot of pressure on actors, but maybe rich people wouldn’t have to take as many government bailouts during the next virus if they worked multiple jobs at once and saved their money when they could. Honestly, making a sequel for every movie at the same time as the first one just seems like the responsible thing to do now.