Baby Driver 2: Edgar Wright Casts Doubt on Directing Sequel

Since 2017’s Baby Driver set the box office on fire and racked up three Academy Award nominations, talk of a sequel has been somewhat consistent. Filmmaker Edgar Wright, despite never making a sequel to any of his other projects previously, has previously opened up about writing a script for a follow-up after being asked to do so by the studio. It’s been unclear if Wright would step behind the camera for a sequel however and in a new interview Wright seems to cast doubt on the possibility of him doing just that. Speaking in a conversation with fellow director Cary Joji Fukunaga for Interview Magazine (H/T The Playlist), Wright notes that he likely won’t direct it if he can’t think of a new thing to do with the material.

“I don’t think I’ve ever done exactly the same thing twice in a row,” Wright said. “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.” He continued, “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.”

Wright previously confirmed that he’d written three drafts of the script to Baby Driver 2 (which was ten months ago, so perhaps another draft or two has happened). It was previously reported that Ansel Elgort would be reprising his as the titular character for the sequel with Lily James returning as Debora and reports of both Jon Bernthal and CJ Jones returning as well.

Upon its release, Baby Driver went on to gross $228 million worldwide, against a reported production budget of $34 million . The film became the highest grossing film of Wright’s career, outgrossing his second highest-film by $147 million. Baby Driver still rocks a 92 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which says the film is “stylish, exciting, and fueled by a killer soundtrack,” and is something the proves “fast-paced action movies can be smartly written without sacrificing thrills.”