Bend It Like Beckham Director Teases Possible Sequel

Following a historic run by England’s women’s football team over the summer, Bend it Like Beckham filmmaker Gurinder Chadha says that she is working on a follow-up to the 2002 hit, which earned more than twenty times its budget back and helped make Keira Knightley a household name. The Lionesses made it to the World Cup final in August for the first time, and while they lost out to Spain in the end, the success created a wave of enthusiasm for women’s and girls’ football. That enthusiasm has Chadha thinking about the movie in ways she says she hasn’t previously.

Bend It Like Beckham centered on Jess Bhamra (Parminder Nagra), a British Indian girl who was inspired to play football by her love of superstar David Beckham. In what would become a staple of Western narratives about Indian girls and women, the key obstacle to Jess’s dreams came in the form of her traditional parents, who disapproved.

“I never really wanted to make a sequel to the film, because I just thought the way Parminder and Keira played it, and Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Archie Panjabi, I could never really follow that up and create that same magic in the same way,” Chadha told UK’s Metro.  “But with the recent success of football, I just feel like I’m starting to percolate an idea for a possible sequel of some kind.”

Here’s the official synopsis for the original, from the European Film Awards:

Eighteen year-old Jess’s parents want her to be a nice, conventional Indian girl. But she just wants to play football like her hero, David Beckham. For Jess, that means kicking a ball around the local park with the lads until she’s spotted by Jules, who invites her to join the local women’s football team. The girls are the same age and they share the same dreams. As they become firm friends, their team really starts to go places.

But Jess’s parents don’t understand why she won’t settle down, study for law school and learn to cook the perfect chapatti. Why, they wonder, can’t she be more like her sister, Pinky, who’s engaged to a very suitable young man? If they only knew what Pinky gets up…

Jules dreams of playing pro-football in the United States, but her Mum wishes she could be a bit more girlie – how is she ever going to find a boyfriend if she won’t put on a dress? What her Mum doesn’t know is that Jules isn’t interested in playing the field -she’s just after one man, Joe, but being the team coach, Joe is out of bounds.

Bend it Like Beckham is currently available to stream on Disney+, Hulu, and the Roku Channel in the U.S.