Well, this is turning out to be a big week for sequel news.
Not only are Anna Kendrick and Rebel Wilson returning for Pitch Perfect 3, which will come out sometime in 2017, but Disney has commissioned a sequel to Maleficent from screenwriter Linda Woolverton.
Kendrick confirmed the news with an Instagram post Monday.
We will refrain from moaning about how sequels are cynical and often creatively-bankrupt cash grabs, and instead try to look at this news critically.
It’s great news for Kendrick and Wilson and certainly reinforces their credibility as major box office draws. In fact, both Pitch Perfect 2 — which beat out Mad Max: Fury Road in its opening weekend — and Maleficent serve as high-profile examples that women-led films are more than capable of crushing ticket sales. Maleficent pulled in nearly $760 million (Dh2 billion) worldwide.
But sequels, as usual, are also where we encounter tricky territory. Are the Barden Bellas comprised solely of undergraduates? Kendrick will be 31 by the time Pitch Perfect 3 comes out on July 21, 2017, and Wilson will be 37. Would it be so awful if they played harried graduate students in their return? And if the first movie was focused on a national championship and the second had the a cappella group trained on a world title, what exactly comes next? Do they turn pro? Is that a thing?
(Yes, it’s a thing. We just checked.)
Angelina Jolie built a career playing a series of mystery-solving, adventuresome, butt-kicking women, but she’s pretty cautious about returning to the same well too much. Jolie did reprise her role as Lara Croft in a Tomb Raider sequel and returned for both follow-ups to Kung Fu Panda. But even though she developed sequels for Salt and Wanted, the chances of her acting in either are tiny.
Still, Deadline reports that Disney is proceeding with a script in hopes of wooing Jolie back for another turn as the flying, fire-breathing sorceress (even though she and Aurora actually live happily ever after in their LSD dreamscape of paradise). Maybe she’s holding out to see whether her directorial and star turn in By the Sea is a dud and she’ll need a big announcement to distract from it.
As for the plot, maybe Maleficent will decide that Aurora needs to be less of a goody-two shoes and teach her how to cast vengeful spells of her own. Who knows?
